


Bewitched (Bothered and Bewildered)

by idoltina



Series: Garden of Shadows [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sabrina the Teenage Witch Fusion, Comedy, F/M, Gen, Magic, Modern Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-12
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-08-22 00:43:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 43,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8266432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idoltina/pseuds/idoltina
Summary: Being a half-witch, half-mortal isn’t exactly a piece of cake. If it were, Regina Mills would have cake for breakfast every day. No, seriously -- an actual, literal piece of cake. Because that’s the way magic works, sometimes: it likes to interpret humanity’s ridiculous little idioms (see: piece of cake, spoiled rotten, and cold feet, just to name a few) and make them completely literal. And it is every bit as obnoxious as one might suppose -- until one day, it isn’t. A Sabrina, The Teenage Witch AU, or three times the literal magical interpretations of idioms were a not-so-literal prickly thorn in Regina’s side, and one time it maybe wasn’t so bad.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [selenacriss (deppcriss)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deppcriss/gifts), [odangoatama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/odangoatama/gifts), [OutlawQueenLuvr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OutlawQueenLuvr/gifts), [Oparu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oparu/gifts).



> **Warnings:** adult language, attempted murder, hospitalization, memory loss, mentions of seizures, non-consensual use of magic, references to previous character death
> 
> Prompt fill for the [one million words extravaganza](http://idoltina.tumblr.com/post/146783328680/earlier-this-month-i-finally-sans-anything-from): **write the sabrina the teenage witch regina!au (please)**.

Every family has secrets, true enough, but Regina Mills thinks that her particular brand of things is, well, unusual. In the mortal realm, secrets tend to be a little more… common, thematically. People lie. People cheat. They fail and falter, fall in love and forgive. Each secret is a product of the human condition. In the Other Realm, secrets are a little more… She hesitates to deem them abstract, because they’re not, not really. They’re actually frighteningly specific, frankly. Her distant uncle Marty once carried on a relationship with a seagull for an entire year, to the great disappointment and disdain of his parents. Her half-cousin Dreama used to turn into a mouse after midnight because of a curse. Even dear Aunt Morgana ( _no, not that one, dear, though you flatter me_ ), twice-removed, had waited an entire year before revealing to Regina that there may have been an unfortunate incident in which she’d transformed the previous head of the Witches’ Council into a mole for 200 years. Not even her cat Luna -- an adoptee of the family at best, unrelated by blood -- could escape the veil of sordid secrets, though she’d try to argue otherwise because _I only tried to take over a planet, dear, you don’t have to make it sound like such a scandal_.

But every family -- well, every magical family from the Other Realm, anyway -- has a secret specific to their own, and being able to _utilize_ one’s magical license required riddling out the secret on one’s own with only the help of the most vague word clues. Regina likes to consider herself a reasonably intelligent sort of person for eighteen -- she excels in math and science and holds her own in the english department -- so it’s not as though it takes her a particularly _long_ time to solve the Grant family secret on her own once she’s gathered enough of the clues from her distant (and often dysfunctional) relatives. It’s just -- she didn’t expect to be quite this _surprised_ by the family secret because, all things considered? It’s almost akin to the melodrama of soap operas of the mortal realm -- tame even in comparison to the vintage ones Aunt Morgana seems to prefer (because _Passions_ , really, could she be any more of a stereotype).

Simply put, the Grant family secret is this: every member of the Grant family always has a biological sibling, and Regina’s has been waiting _two years_ to meet her.

It’s all a little jarring, to be perfectly honest. The step-sister, Regina has known about; her mother had remarried sometime in the last two years to a warlock widower in the Other Realm, and with the marriage had come an audacious little girl by the name of _Snow_ (no, seriously) who is eight years Regina’s junior. Regina’s only met her a handful of times since she moved to Salem and took up residence with Aunt Morgana, but they’re not particularly close.

The biological sibling, though, turns out to be a sordid secret of Mother’s even without all of the weird magical limitations in place that prevent Regina and her sibling from knowing one another. The sister -- Zelena -- is a product of a relationship their mother had prior to meeting Regina’s father ( _a dalliance_ , Cora sniffs disdainfully, _though at least he wasn’t a mere mortal like your father_ ), and by the time Regina figures out the family secret shortly after her eighteenth birthday, Zelena -- a whole two years older -- had been practically chomping at the bit to meet her.

When they do meet, it’s at the family reunion in Atlantis -- actual underwater resort Atlantis. And in all honesty, it doesn’t start off half bad. Each finds out a fair bit about the other, and while Zelena’s attitude toward mortals is a bit too… condescending for Regina’s taste (it reminds her far too much of Mother and the rest of the Witches’ Council, and Regina is, after all, half-mortal herself), Regina finds that her half-sister is actually kind of… interesting. She’s _prodigiously_ gifted when it comes to magic, able to come up with clever incantations on the spot and brew potions without any mishaps, but she’s also a bit… rebellious. She doesn’t seem to have any qualms about showing off her talents for Regina even if they result in things like the concierge's hair turning blue for an entire afternoon. (That little incident makes Mother furious with them both, but Zelena’s barely bitten-back grin makes it worth it.)

Of course, because this is the Other Realm -- and because it’s not enough for her family to have this one ridiculously important secret that their entire coming of age experience is built around -- the brief spot of joy either of them finds in the other’s company vanishes within the space of two days. Because in addition to having a built-in biological sibling, there is also, naturally, a catch. Siblings in the Grant family, it seems, are split down the dichotomy of good and evil, and each of their magical histories is held up for examination and judgment.

(How Mother ended up on the good side of things, Regina will never know.)

And Regina, well, she hasn’t exactly been a paragon of perfection the last two years since finding out about her bloodline and her abilities. She’s struggled with magic far more than it seems Zelena had, and, okay, there’s the Daniel thing, too, but her intentions there have at least been good. It’s not like Daniel finding out about the Other Realm is something any witch or warlock would be particularly thrilled with. But there’s more beyond that which doesn’t particularly reflect well on her -- one too many spiteful practical jokes, that “accidental” earthquake she’d caused in the middle of the school cafeteria last autumn. But she refuses to feel the least bit bad about putting Ella Deville in her place: the girl is _vile_ and cruel to animals, and Regina isn’t _heartless_ , after all.

Still, at the end of the day, Regina’s actions reflect poorly enough on her that she’s the one who ends up with that little red _evil_ stamp in her Other Realm records, and as if that weren’t bad enough, she’s also on the receiving end of the according punishment.

Which is how she finds herself at the top of the underwater volcano in the resort lobby waiting for her half-sister to push her in -- to her actual death.

Somehow, this seems a bit extreme, but that’s not the real surprise of the evening.

The real surprise is that Zelena _actually pushes her in_.

And one magical rescue and way too much how-is-this-possible soot in her hair later, Regina finds that this -- the task they’d given Zelena at the top of the volcano -- had been the _real_ test of their true natures, and Zelena had failed with flying colors because _what kind of person actually shoves their sibling into an underwater volcano_?

Mother had sneered at her rather disdainfully -- _wicked girl_ \-- and Zelena had bolted the minute she’d discovered what the _actual_ punishment was for failing (Other Realm privatized prison, apparently). And Regina, well. As… _irritated_ as Regina is that her sister was casually okay with killing her, Regina finds herself more ticked off at the fact that the stupid dichotomy exists in the first place -- and even moreso at the way the Witches’ Council and any magical governmental branches have decided to go about _enforcing_ a _private_ matter.

The whole affair is, quite frankly, _ludicrous_.

Regina finds it infuriating enough that she doesn’t even bother washing the (seriously _how_ ) soot out of her hair or changing out of the majestic purple gown they’d given her for the ceremony before she’s storming off after her newly-minted sister, determined to sort this out. Eventually, she finds Zelena holed up in the bathroom of her suite, door locked, and in the end, all Regina can do is lean heavily against the door and try not to cough up soot. “Zelena,” she sighs, doing her best to sound patient. “Please come out and talk to me.”

“Go _away_ ,” Zelena seethes from the other side of the door. “You shouldn’t have followed me here, anyway. Our _darling_ mother wouldn’t want you to be seen associating with someone like _me_.”

Regina wrinkles her nose in annoyance. “Frankly, I don’t give a damn what Mother thinks,” she snaps, irritated. “That’s not what this is about. This is about the fact that this whole thing is ridiculous.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Zelena snaps back, voice sounding a bit muffled for a moment. “To them, you’re some sort of, I don’t know, _goody two-shoes_ \--”

“Okay, now _you’re_ being ridiculous,” Regina chuckles, half-coughing up a bit of ash. “Earlier today, they were ready to brand me as evil -- or have you already forgotten that little detail?”

“But they _didn’t_ ,” Zelena argues, “and they’re going to send _me_ to some horrible place where I’ll probably have to do some abhorrent community service and wear _orange_ and, I’m sorry, but you and I both know that is absolutely not my color.”

Regina bites back a proper laugh at the mental image and adjusts her position against the door. “Need I remind you, _Sis_ , that you pushed me into a _volcano_ less than an hour ago?”

“Yes, how horrible of me,” Zelena drawls, clearly moving things around on the counter. “I should just do us all a favor and disappear, blah, blah, well _don’t worry_ ,” she announces, dramatically whipping the door open and locking eyes with Regina for the space of a second. “I’m _going_.” Zelena brushes past her with all of the force of a tornado and snatches up a carpet bag, but Regina stands still, rooted to the spot.

Her sister is, quite literally, turning _green_.

She files away the first thing that springs to mind -- _she’s definitely not in the mortal realm anymore_ \-- and resolves to try and laugh about it later because now is so not the time. She tries to focus her mind and fumbles for words, putting the pieces together. “You’re turning -- envy,” she settles on instead, figuring Zelena probably won’t appreciate her pointing out the obvious right now. “You’re _jealous_ ,” she breathes, turning on the spot to face her sister again. “You’re… packing.” She deflates a bit at that, shoulders falling even as she anchors her hands on her hips. “You’re going to try and run.”

Zelena _tsk_ s in annoyance but doesn’t look up from where she’s gathering up some of her things. “Yes, well, since you’re supposed to the _charitable_ one or whatnot, I figure you might be _kind_ enough to give me a head start, Sis.” She dumps half of her things into the bag unceremoniously and tosses the other half in without finesse, and it’s that -- the simple fact that Zelena isn’t even bothering to use magic to pack -- which tells Regina exactly two things. One, Zelena is rattled enough by the turn the night’s events have taken to the point where Regina’s not even sure that it _occurs_ to her sister that she still, for the time being, _can_ use magic. Two, if it _does_ occur to Zelena that she could still be using magic, then she’s deliberately choosing not to, and the fact that packing by hand takes more time is something not lost on Regina at all.

Zelena, for all of her bluster, doesn’t actually want to leave, and Regina finds that she wants her sister to stay.

“I’m not going to turn you in,” Regina sighs, exasperated. “I want you to stay. I can’t fix this without your help.”

“I don’t need you to extend your charity that far, darling. Some things just can’t be helped,” Zelena argues, short and clipped and still very much not looking at her. “This is just the way I am, remember? True colors and all of that.”

“Okay, your developing little… skin condition here is brand new, Zelena,” Regina drawls, rolling her shoulders back in an effort to pull herself together enough to deal with this. “So we can do one of two things. You can get over yourself and come with me to petition the Witches’ Council for an injunction. Or, if you’re interested in fixing this little hiccup before we go do that, we can sit here and you can tell me exactly what the reason is behind your _absurd_ jealousy of me because I’m pretty sure this is an idiom interpretation, and the only way to get it to stop is --”

“I know perfectly well how magic works, _thank you_ ,” Zelena snaps, practically spitting it at her as she tosses a book into her bag. “I grew up here, remember?”

“Then what in this or any other realm do you _possibly_ have to be jealous of --”

“She gave you _everything_ ,” Zelena seethes, dropping her voice as she finally deigns to look Regina in the eye again. The green is spreading, sparkling and shimmering as it follows the curve of her jaw and starts to dip its way past her elbows, but Regina hardly spares it a glance, too transfixed by her sister’s words to tear her gaze away. “She sent you to learn magic from someone proper and even gave you a whole host of relatives to help you figure out this miserable little secret. She’s gotten you out of every spot of trouble you’ve found yourself in over the last two years because you’re her _favorite_ ,” Zelena rants, snapping her bag shut and hoisting it onto her as she takes two steps toward the door. “She _kept_ you, which I cannot even _begin_ to understand -- I mean, you’re half- _mortal_ , honestly --”

“Alright, _enough_!” Regina shouts, pointing her finger furiously at the door to lock it. Zelena narrows her eyes for a fraction of a second before the entire room starts to _shake_ around them, water twirling in tides outside of her window. She trips a bit in place, loses her grip on her bag and has to clutch the arm of the couch for purchase, but Regina hardly registers the earthquake at all, hands curled into fists at her sides.

It’s over in the space of half a minute, but Zelena still manages to look properly affronted when she straightens up and folds her arms over her chest. “And they think _I’m_ the naughty one,” she quips. “Do try not to have another temper tantrum, Sis, I’m not sure Atlantis is built to handle another tectonic event of that magnitude.”

“Okay, I am all out of charity for today,” Regina grits out, pointing her non-dominant finger at the couch. “So sit down, shut up, and _listen_ to me for five minutes instead of making all of these assumptions so that we can throw a _real_ temper tantrum and actually, I don’t know, fix this?”

“And what makes you think I’ve any interest in what you have to say?”

“You have been waiting to meet me for _two years_ ,” Regina points out. “I have known about you for two _days_. Even if you _hadn’t_ pushed me into that volcano earlier, I think you can give me five minutes to disprove that little fantasy about me you’ve built up in your head.”

Zelena works her jaw, clearly irritated at the fight Regina’s putting up, but after a minute of staring her down, she sinks down onto the couch with all the grace of a flying monkey and huffs out a breath in resignation. “Five minutes.”

Regina matches her sister’s breath with her own and settles down on the couch next to her. Zelena makes a show of shuffling away from her a little, legs pressed together tight, but Regina doesn’t miss the way one of Zelena’s hands flits up, fingers tracing down her neck. She’s self-conscious about the skin thing, that much is obvious, but there’s more there, underneath it all, that Regina can’t quite figure out or place. Still, it’s enough to curb some of the edge of Regina’s anger and incredulity, and she allows herself another long moment or two to make sure her breathing is level and her temper is more in check before she tries talking.

After all, she didn’t just survive a tumble into an underwater volcano just to drown instead.

“Okay, first of all, I am _not_ Mother’s favorite,” Regina mutters thinly, hands gripping her knees tight. She shifts her focus there, trains her gaze on the way soot has clung to her skin, smudged and shaded in places she’s sure aren’t going to be easy to clean. “I have seen her a grand total of three times since I was _five_ , and one of those times was this reunion. She didn’t put extra effort into making sure I had a proper magical mentor so much as she basically pawned me off on Aunt Morgana -- who, while she knows what she’s doing, is not exactly a paragon of purity or some sort or progeny or anything. And the only reason Mother helps me when I do anything _unseemly_ is because it reflects poorly on _her_.” Even in her peripheral vision, Regina can see the way Zelena softens visibly at that, fingers falling from her neck.

 _Wicked girl_ hangs, unspoken and heavy in the air between them, and Zelena shifts on the couch, leg pressing lightly against Regina’s. “Since you were five?” she ventures, clearly trying to come off as casual but failing miserably.

Regina sighs and reaches up a hand to run her fingers through her hair, wincing when she meets tangles and tugs a little too hard. Ash dusts her hands and dress and the cushion beneath her, and for a wild moment, she wonders what the state of the flowers in her hair must be at this point. It’s enough of a distraction for her to rattle off what she knows of the story, and her exhaustion, she thinks, must be clear even to Zelena at this point; Regina doesn’t think her sister would have relented quite so easily, otherwise. “She was at risk of losing her witch’s license,” Regina explains, unable to help sounding a little bitter. “The only reason she married my father to begin with was because she figured if she couldn’t make something of herself here --”

“-- she might as well try elsewhere,” Zelena supplies, her voice a little softer around the edges. Regina glances over at her, startled, and she’s more than surprised to find an odd sort of understanding in her sister’s eyes. Though, she supposes it does make a fair amount of sense; the carpet bag packed and waiting between them and the front door is proof enough of that. But the moment is gone before Regina can do more than acknowledge its existence, and Zelena’s eyes grow clouded once more, nose wrinkling in apparent confusion as she pulls her leg away. “She, um -- she was at risk of losing her license,” she says, clearing her throat a little. “Why?”

Regina shrugs a little and turns her attention back to her hands, picking at soot beneath her nails. “Who knows?” she sighs heavily. “I never got a straight answer from her or anyone else. Her case was dragged out for ages. I was five when they finally issued their verdict, and she was out the door faster than you pushed me into that volcano. I never even knew why until she showed up on my sixteenth birthday to help Morgana explain the whole magic thing to me.”

She watches in her peripheral vision as Zelena’s fingers slide over the silk of her own gown -- skin pale and green against midnight blue -- and notes the way the hue of the fabric changes over each pass, colors shifting and shimmering like a mood ring. It’s idle magic -- thoughtless, really -- and while Regina is definitely appreciative of the beauty of it, she also feels more than a twinge of jealousy at the ease with which Zelena’s power comes forth. It’s tight in her chest for a moment before dissipating, but Regina holds onto it a little longer; it’s a card, after all, she may have to play if she can’t completely convince Zelena around to her side of things.

As it is, the clearly anxious fidgeting on Zelena’s part is an indicator that the wheels in her head are turning as she puts together these newer pieces with what Regina’s already shared with her over the last two days. Zelena’s smart -- well, about most things, anyway -- and Regina’s sure she’s realizing why she’d been mostly raised by her father; why she moved to Salem; why she’s spent her time since his death under Morgana’s care instead of Mother’s. But none of those things are the thing that Zelena fixates on. “That’s two,” she says instead. “What was the other one?”

Regina casts a side-glance at her, eyes narrowed as she tries to figure out what the hell Zelena’s referring to, but she’s reasonably quick, too, and it doesn’t take her long at all to put her own pieces together. “It was after she remarried,” she huffs, reclining back against the couch cushions and giving up her inspection of her nails. “She didn’t bother inviting me to the ceremony, but she had me over to dinner, a while after. She wanted me to meet her new husband and his daughter.”

The silence that lingers in the air feels colder than it did before, heavy and not quite so sharp, and still Regina finds herself surprised at the ways in which Zelena is narrowing, focusing, steering the direction of this conversation. “She didn’t even want me to meet them,” Zelena says quietly after a long moment. “She _kept_ you, she --”

“ _Zelena_ \--”

“No,” Zelena cuts in sharply, pushing herself up off of the couch so abruptly that Regina can’t help but sit up a little straighter to look at her properly. Zelena spins only a few feet away, skirt twirling with the movement, and for a split second, the underwater light catches and cascades against silk and skin and hair made of fire. Even in envy, she commands the attention of the room, every sound like that of a siren. “You got your five minutes. Now it’s my turn. You wanted to know why.”

That hits Regina harder than she really wants it to. It’s not as if she plans on holding the volcano thing over Zelena’s head forever, but this -- the even exchange of five minutes -- puts them more on equal ground than they’ve really been at any point in the last two days. The twinge of envy in Regina’s chest -- of incredulity and anger -- softens a bit around the edges, giving way to something akin to patience. With a measured breath, she forces herself to scoot forward on the couch and grips the edge of the cushions to anchor herself down. “Okay,” she agrees. "Why?”

Zelena seems satisfied with the allowance, but still nervous; she fidgets a little, glances down at her hands and then folds her arms quickly, clearly not wanting to see the product of her still-raging jealousy. “She _gave me up_ ,” Zelena reminds her emphatically, and Regina very carefully bites her tongue. “She wanted nothing to do with me. And while the witch who adopted me was… really rather wonderful, and warm, she also died when I was very young. And her husband -- he…”

“Wasn’t so warm?” Regina supplies, venturing a guess after a long pause.

Zelena exhales sharply, and it’s as much of an affirmation as Regina thinks she’s going to get. “When it came time for _me_ to solve the family secret, he told me to go find my real family if I wanted any help.” A pause, a beat, and then, “I had to petition to gain access to my adoption records so I could track down Mother. And when I finally did, she hardly spent fifteen minutes giving me an abridged version of what I needed to know before shoving me in Aunt Mildred’s direction to get the rest of what I needed.”

Regina relaxes her grip on the couch at that, lips twisting into a wry smile. “That sounds like her.”

“You don’t understand,” Zelena sighs dramatically, and it’s honestly the most petulant thing Regina’s heard her say in the last hour, but she swallows her equally pithy response down and tries to give Zelena the rest of her five minutes. “No one took the time to _teach me_ anything. I had to learn most things on my own. But you? People _hover_ , for you.”

Regina can’t help the derisive sound that escapes her at that, eyebrows arching and betraying her incredulity in a heartbeat. “Okay,” she says dryly, shifting a little on the couch, “ _not_ that I agree with that assessment, but did it ever occur to you that the reason people seem to hover is because I might actually need it? Because I might be bad at all of this?” she suggests, waving a hand around absently to encompass the idea of magic. Zelena actually does roll her eyes at that, but Regina presses onward, knowing the time to play the rest of her cards is growing near. “I didn’t find out I was a witch until I was sixteen,” she reminds her sister. “The next two weeks after that, all Aunt Morgana tried to teach me how to do was turn oranges into apples. Do you know what I ended up with? _Pineapples_.”

Zelena’s gaze settles on her at that, and Regina swears she sees the corner of Zelena’s mouth twitch up in an almost smile. “That sounds ridiculously incompetent.”

“Hence the hovering,” Regina laughs lightly. “You may have been left to figure things out on your own, Zelena, but you are… _prodigiously_ talented,” she admits with a sigh, shifting uncomfortably on the couch. “That’s not something you can teach.”

“I’m really not in the mood for false flattery --”

“Oh, please,” Regina scoffs, thin and short and dry as she breaks eye contact and looks away. “Don’t confuse false flattery with begrudging honesty.” She pauses for half a moment as her gaze falls to where her hand is tucked against her side, and it’s with a weary sigh that she swallows down her pride and looks back up at her sister. “You want to talk about envy, Zelena?” she muses, holding up her hand for display. “Two can play at that game.”

At the sight of Regina’s now green thumb, Zelena seems sufficiently shocked, blinking rapidly as her whole posture relaxes. Slowly, her smile softens and spreads, and there’s absolutely no mistaking the little thrill in her voice underneath all that bemusement. “You should start a garden.”

“Yeah,” Regina snorts derisively, “a regular troll in Central Park, if I lived in New York.” Zelena’s amusement falters, just for a second as confusion flashes across her face, but Regina waves a hand dismissively and mutters a quick _mortal reference, don’t worry about it_ before pushing herself to her feet. It’s easy to take the few steps to close the distance between her and her sister, but she stops just shy of being close enough to take Zelena’s hand, suddenly unsure if she’s built enough of a bridge to cross just yet. “Look,” she ventures carefully, settling for anchoring a hand over her stomach instead. “The sibling thing I don’t think anyone will ever get around. That seems pretty set in stone. But the dichotomy? It’s... archaic, honestly, and nonsensical, and it strips people of their free will. Not to mention, they’re using public resources to enforce private business --”

“The prisons are private --”

“-- but the government _isn’t_ ,” Regina counters quickly, and it’s then that she reaches for Zelena’s hand, thoughtless and easy and not at all thought through. Zelena looks down at where their fingers touch -- at where the green of Regina’s thumb smooths over the matching color along Zelena’s knuckles -- and, much to Regina’s surprise, doesn’t try to pull away. Bolstered, Regina presses on, taking tentative steps forward. “The Witches’ Council is about public service. Enforcing this stupid rule shouldn’t even be their business. Enforcing it at all shouldn’t be _anyone’s_ business,” she reasons, a thought occurring to her. “There have to be cases where they can’t actually enforce it. What about families with more than two siblings? What happens if no one gets pushed into a volcano? I mean, _honestly_ ,” she says, pulling forth one of her next-to-last cards, “how did someone like our _mother_ end up on the good side of things, Zelena? I’m not entirely convinced she didn’t find some way to cheat the system.”

A barely suppressed laugh makes its way out of Zelena’s nose as she bites back a smile. She doesn’t look back up, not yet, but Regina knows, she can tell: she’s getting through to her. “Well, considering what you’ve just told me about her nearly losing her license, I wouldn’t put it past her,” Zelena muses. “And… I suppose those aren’t _terrible_ points.”

“Well if you find merit in those arguments, then we may yet be able to make the Council see reason,” Regina chuckles. “But… I can’t do this on my own,” she confesses, gently squeezing Zelena’s hand. “I need your help.”

She feels Zelena’s hand tense in her own at that, sees the way her smile falters around the edges. Something tightens in Regina’s chest at the risk of hope lost, but as much as she wants to grip Zelena’s hand a little tighter, she forces herself to stay relaxed and resume her steady stroking over the back of her sister’s hand. “What makes you think they’d actually listen to someone like me?”

And it’s there, in the air again -- _evil_ and _wicked girl_ \-- but Regina sucks in a sharp breath and tries to force it to evaporate. “What makes you think they’ll be any more likely to listen to _me_? I’m half-mortal,” Regina laughs bitterly. But the teasing doesn’t land with Zelena the way Regina wants it to; she can see it the way Zelena’s shoulders have tensed into a straight line, in the way she shifts her weight from one leg to the other and flexes her fingers uncomfortably in Regina’s grasp.

And all at once, Regina recognizes Zelena’s hesitation for what it really is: though she probably would never admit it, she too is clinging to the last vestiges of hope, afraid of loss.

In Zelena’s eyes, Regina is the one with the power.

It takes more effort than she’s proud of for Regina to pull out her last card in order to level the playing field, but it’s the one needed to win -- the one _Regina_ needs, in order for Zelena to fully understand. “Look,” Regina says again, words feeling thick and awkward on her tongue as she adjusts her grasp on Zelena’s hand. “Beyond needing your help in trying to fix this, I don’t… really feel like I _belong_ anywhere. I know, I know -- angsty existential teenage crisis,” she adds quickly, an automatic counter to the way Zelena finally lifts her gaze to presumably roll her eyes at Regina. “But honestly, magic makes things… complicated in the mortal realm,” she admits quietly, and it’s Daniel she thinks of -- of wayward spells and mishaps and memory potions alike. “And here? Here, most people look at me like I don’t really _count_. I’m only half a witch, after all.”

Zelena swallows audibly at that, the green on her skin shimmering under ocean light in a way that makes Regina think she’s fighting a blush. That’s shame, she thinks, and maybe a little guilt; after all, Zelena isn’t exactly alone or innocent in thinking less of mere mortals. But it’s not where Regina wants to play her final card -- not entirely, anyway -- so again, she pushes forward, dropping the final stones of her shabby bridge into place. She’s the one to look away this time, knowing her cheeks are probably tinged a little pink, but she finds comfort and anchorage in the way Zelena’s fingers intertwine with her own, green and ash almost frenemies in kind. “Two days ago, I found out I had another sister, and all I could think was that maybe, _finally_ I could have someone who could help me make sense of all of this -- someone who could make this place feel a little more like home. Someone who would make it so I didn’t feel quite so… alone in all of this.

“I don’t _need_ you to get by, Zelena. I can do just fine on my own. But even when no one else seems to want you around, I… _promise_ you that _I do_. And maybe that makes me a little, I don’t know, selfish, but people aren’t only good or evil,” she says, chancing a glance back up at her sister. “I’ve got a little darkness of my own, too.”

And Zelena, amazingly, almost inexplicably, smiles at her, beaming and bright and practically warm by comparison, and all at once, it’s like staring at the sun.

The green on her skin slowly starts to recede.

“You wear it well,” Zelena insists with a slight chuckle, and Regina matches the laugh with one of her own, quiet and tentative in the offering. Zelena’s the one who takes over this whole hand holding business now, adjusting their clasp so her grip is firm and strong against Regina’s hands. Each of them tapers off into an awkward, embarrassed silence of their own design, but Regina’s olive branch seems to have landed well with her sister, if nothing else. Still, Zelena is… hedging, hesitant and unsure, and she’s not _quite_ looking Regina in the eye when she ventures, “What if… they won’t listen to reason, from either of us? What if I --”

“I promise,” Regina reassures her, squeezing her hands in kind, “I won’t let them turn you into an oompa loompa.”

Zelena _does_ manage to meet her eyes at that, expression betraying both her amusement and confusion. “What,” she deadpans, arching an eyebrow, “in the name of Merlin’s apothecary is an oompa loompa?”

“Ask me again sometime,” Regina laughs. “The important thing is,” she sighs, releasing Zelena’s hands and pulling her in for a gentle, tentative hug, “that we have both finally solved the family secret, and now that I have you, I am _not_ letting them take you away from me so soon.”

It’s a long moment before Zelena finally brings her arms up to wrap around Regina in kind, hiding a smile against Regina’s neck, chin trembling all the while. “Well,” Zelena muses, voice not at all thick with the possible onslaught of tears, “I guess the pineapple does fall far from the tree, after all.”

“You are the _worst_ ,” Regina groans, pulling away just enough to shove lightly at Zelena’s shoulder.

Zelena grins, wide and mischievous, and it is by far the most wicked thing Regina has ever seen -- in the absolute best way possible. “I’m your sister,” she says. “I’m supposed to be.”


	2. Chapter 2

For someone unaccused of any crime, when Regina stands before the Witches’ Council barely a month after her high school graduation, she feels very much as though she’s on trial.

She wonders if this is what her ancestors felt like before the mortals -- before the fires.

But this isn’t the 17th century, and the Witches’ Council is meant to uphold the laws in place that protect their own kind. Perhaps that’s why Regina finds herself nervous as she approaches their bench again after they’ve concluded deliberations; it’s not her she’s seeking to protect, but someone else -- a mortal.

Daniel.

And Regina is, after all, only half of each -- an oddity caught in the in-between. She’s reasonably sure that’s not going to help her case here. The Witches’ Council, while generally fair and law-upholding, is not free of members who hold their own biases and prejudices. Gold, in particular, is the worst. He’s a picture perfect representation of someone with deep roots in magical blood: someone who looks down their nose upon mortals as less-than; someone who makes no secret of his desire to abolish inter-species _breeding_ (even the memory of the word is enough to make Regina’s skin crawl); someone who, if he had any say in the matter, would close off every last portal between the Other Realm and the mortal world for good. Gold isn’t all powerful here -- there are too many failsafes in place for him to try and make a real bid for it -- but he has enough sway to tip votes in his favor every once in awhile. Still, at the moment, he is not actually the person on the council Regina fears the most when it comes to this particular decision.

It’s Mother.

“Regina Mills,” Gold says, and though he doesn’t raise his voice, it rings out sharp and clear in the chasm of the room. She sucks in a breath and squares her shoulders, locking her fingers together so she doesn’t fidget. She knows better than to answer him. “After much deliberation, the Council has decided to grant your request.”

All of the air leaves her at once, and for the space of a second, she almost makes the mistake of smiling.

Almost.

The look in Mother’s eyes is enough to keep Regina’s smile at bay.

“The Council,” Gold continues, an edge of disdain creeping into his voice, “has decided that it does not reflect well upon our kind to allow this kind of... damage inflicted upon a mortal to go unaddressed. However,” he says, voice lilting a bit, “there is a condition. As this Mister --” Here he pauses, rifling through the pages in front of him. Regina swallows her bitterness down hard; of _course_ Gold couldn’t be bothered to remember Daniel’s name. “-- Colter has already reached the maximum magical quota for a mortal, the potion in question will only take effect if you are willing to pay the cost.”

“The cost?” she echoes, the words spilling from her unbidden.

Gold narrows his eyes, looking marginally annoyed, but Mother -- Mother looks furious that Regina’s forgotten to bite her tongue. “The mortal’s mind needs to mend,” he explains. “It will be akin to a clean slate. He won’t retain any of the damage caused by that last spell pushing him to the quota, nor will he retain any memory of our kind or our realm.”

Regina’s stomach plummets, the gravity of the situation finally sinking in. And she wishes -- she _wishes_ she weren’t looking at Mother right now, wishes she couldn’t see the smallest traces of satisfaction in her eyes. “He won’t remember me,” she breathes, eyes slipping shut.

“You _have_ been rather liberal with your use of magic in the mortal realm, Miss Mills,” one of the other council members -- Kerrigan, by the sound of it -- reminds her. Regina squeezes her eyes shut a little harder, anger boiling up at her sternum. Kerrigan’s much too sanctimonious and by-the-book for Regina’s taste, though she’s sure that she’s not exactly Kerrigan’s favorite person in any realm either given Regina’s successful injunction earlier this year. “Particularly where Mister Colter is concerned. For us to make such an allowance to help set things right, precautions must be taken to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.”

Regina’s eyes snap open, temper flaring at the implication that this is _her_ fault. She’s used her fair share of magic over the last two years, true enough, though it’s not as though anyone could expect any less of a sixteen year old dabbling in magic for the first time. But everything she’d done to -- everything she’d done where Daniel was concerned was all in an effort to protect not only him, but to protect her people as well. He _had_ to be kept in the dark.

(“Trust me, darling,” Aunt Morgana had insisted. “The second you tell a mortal the truth about magic is the second it all goes south.”)

But now is not the time to let her anger get the best of her. Mother would never let her live down such a… temper tantrum, is probably how she’d put it, but Mother’s penchant for prestige and decorum are hardly the most pressing reasons for Regina’s fury now. Regina swallows her anger down and deliberately averts her gaze away from her mother. “So,” she says, struggling to keep her voice steady and even, “the cost --”

“-- is the thing you love most,” Gold supplies, and in the split second before Regina’s gaze shifts and lands on him, she swears she sees the glitter of a grin. His face is uncharacteristically stoic once her eyes lock with his, of course, but she saw, she knows.

Slowly, Regina looks back at Mother, and no matter the time they have spent apart, she knows all too well just _how_ well Mother wears victory on her skin.

For Daniel to live, Regina can never see him again.

(Idly, she wonders if this is meant to be Mother’s form of punishment for the way she’d stood up for Zelena earlier this year.)

She takes a breath in a desperate attempt to steady herself, deliberately picking a spot behind the heads of the Council to lose her focus. “What do I have to do?”

“Council member White will assist you in brewing the potion that will be administered to Mister Colter,” Kerrigan explains. Bile makes its way up Regina’s throat; they’ve done that on purpose, she’s sure, so that Mother can keep an eye on her and makes sure she upholds her end of the bargain. Regina exhales sharply, trying valiantly to bite her tongue and keep the bile at bay, and she resolutely does not give any of them the satisfaction of looking them in the eyes. “Once the potion has been brewed, you will need to transport it to the healing ward where he’s being held -- I believe they call that a hospital? -- on foot.”

“Why on --”

“This is your price,” Gold interrupts, the edge back in his voice. “To enact such a salvation, you must go the extra mile.”

Again, Regina’s eyes slip shut of their own accord. She can hardly find it in her to be annoyed at the frankly ridiculous mechanism of magic that interprets idioms literally (she’d been annoyed enough when she’d somehow found herself transformed into a _bee_ two months into her senior year, and Aunt Morgana’s coy advice that she should probably dial back on the extracurriculars had only served to irk her further). No, this is deliberate on behalf of the council -- a _punishment_ meant to rub salt in her already burning wounds. She doesn’t _mind_ the walking, but it’s the added time, she thinks, that’s meant to make her suffer -- a prolonging of the inevitable breaking of her heart.

Vaguely, she wonders if this -- this feeling of simmering homicidal tendencies -- is what prompts people to try and topple regimes. She’ll have to ask Luna sometime.

For now, Regina keeps her eyes shut and tries to pull the happier memories of Daniel forward: the warmth of his smile; the low timbre of his laugh; the way his fingers had felt tracing the skin beneath her bracelet. But each memory is jarred with another to take its place, jagged around the edges as they sharply cut into the forefront of her mind: the way his tongue had struggled to call forth words, clumsy in his mouth; the high keen of his cry with every stabbing migraine; the trembling spasms of his hands following every seizure.

Tears sting at her eyes, brimming on her lashes, but she does not let them fall no matter how violently her heart is beating her senselessly. Chin trembling and eyes closed for just a moment longer, Regina holds her head up high and lets love fill her lungs. “Done.”

Everything passes in a blur, after that. She only just manages to keep her tears at bay for the next little while, but it takes nearly _all_ of her concentration to do so. She can barely keep enough focus to lean over a cauldron and begin brewing the potion in question, and she has none to spare for Mother’s not-so-idle chatter while they work. Oh, Regina hears it, all right -- it would be near impossible not to -- but she keeps a firm wall up between her and Mother’s remarks just enough to keep them from landing. She ignores the constant hovering of Mother’s hand while Regina follows the instructions, ignores the pressing, prying questions that are clearly just an attempt to get more information out of her. She ignores the false, cloyingly sweet, sycophantic sympathy of Mother’s apologies, ignores the reassurances that _rest assured, this will work, dear, no one who ever knew you were together will remember after this_.

(Resolutely, Regina ignores the swell of pride she feels when Mother tells her that her potions work is more than acceptable; she forces herself to call up memories of Zelena, instead, of talent and skill and _she only cares about how things reflect upon her_.)

In the end, Regina bottles up a perfectly brewed, sparkling pink potion for Daniel, her heart too-heavy in her chest, and Mother’s hand finds her shoulder, the weight almost too much for Regina to bear. “I _am_ sorry about this, sweetheart,” Mother insists, emphatic and soft and, Regina knows, completely insincere, “but I promise you it’s what’s best for you.” Regina bites her tongue and nods once imperceptibly, hatred burning into bile at the edges of her throat.

If Mother -- if _Cora_ really knew what was best for her, she never would have interfered at all.

Regina carries that thought with her as she makes her way back through the linen closet portal to the house Aunt Morgana’s left in her care, the regular chime of thunder and lightning hardly registering with any of her senses. She hardly spares a thought for where Luna might be curled up at the moment, can’t even bring herself to seek her out to deliver the news. Saying it out loud -- at least right now -- makes it too real in a way that Regina isn’t sure she could ever really be ready for. She hadn’t even been aware that mortals _had_ a magical quota until Daniel had met his, and while she’s certain he would’ve met it regardless of the meddling of others, she’s also absolutely positive that it didn’t have to happen this way.

The hospital isn’t far -- actually just about a literal mile away -- and she could easily loop up and around to the main road, but Regina sets out down Valley instead of Proctor, taking the long way around instead. She doesn’t bother changing out of her boots in spite of the fact that they’ll probably give her blisters walking this far; even if this idiom interpretation is meant to punish her by hurting her feet, Regina’s not even sure she’ll feel it. She barely feels the sun beating down on her bare shoulders, hardly notices the way sweat gathers on her brow, hair curling at the nape of her neck. It’s all… _there_ , at the edges of her senses and consciousness -- logically, she _knows_ they’re there -- but each sensation is acknowledged and forgotten in the space of half a breath. She can barely get herself to _focus_ on what direction she’s going in, but she’s careful with her bookbag, at least, adjusting the strap every few minutes to make sure the bottle inside is safe.

When she reaches the main road and crosses the street, she lingers on the sidewalk at the corner, fingers fidgeting restlessly with the strap of her bag. It’s here, just at the edge of the front lawn of the high school, that she feels her focus come into sharp clarity, and her resolve begins to crumble at last. She doesn’t want to cross the threshold onto the property; she’s not sure she could handle it, honestly -- not when being this close is hard enough already. Idly, she toys with the bracelet on her left wrist, thumb grazing over the engraving along the inside as her gaze drifts, lands and settles on the fountain in the courtyard just below the school steps.

_”Is this your version of a letterman’s jacket?” she chuckles, examining the simple -- beautiful -- silver bracelet Daniel’s just given her._

_”Something like that, sure, but here -- look on the inside,” he urges, scooting a little closer to her on the stone surrounding the fountain until his knee brushes against hers._

_She arches an eyebrow, lips twisting into a wry smile, but she does as he requests and flips the bracelet in her hand, bringing it a little closer to inspect the engraving on the inside. “12:36,” she reads off, glancing up at him curiously._

_“That’s what time it was on the clock in the library,” he explains, matching her smile with his own, “when you and I first met.”_

_Regina softens a little at that, touched, but she shakes her head even as she bites back a laugh. “You know,” she muses, teasing a little as she undoes the clasp on the bracelet, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d almost say that I clearly hadn’t captured your interest enough at that point.”_

_“But you do know better,” Daniel volleys back, laughing free and unbidden. He reaches out to take the bracelet from her, gesturing for her to present her wrist so he can fasten it for her. Regina obliges, using her free hand to tuck her hair behind her ear, and this time she bites back a smile that is equal parts bemused and near giddy. “I marked the time,” he explains, dropping his voice to a low murmur as he loops the bracelet around her wrist and fastens the clasp, “because I wanted to know when we began.” He pauses, just for a minute, to adjust the bracelet so it rests neatly on her wrist, before he looks up at her again, his eyes warm. “I want to count every last minute I spend with you.”_

_And when Daniel’s lips grace hers for the first time, Regina can’t bring herself to care who’s watching._

The clocktower at the front of the school chimes noon, and Regina closes her eyes against the pain, each _clang_ like a bruising, breaking beat against her heart. When silence fills the air again, there are once again tears brimming on her lashes, and the breath she draws in is cold and sharp and not enough.

By their own design, thirty-six minutes should be all the time they have left.

She presses on.

She’s nearly halfway there -- the logical part of her brain knows this, acknowledges it, ignores it -- but it doesn’t feel that way at all. All at once, she is both too close and too far, and her legs feel tired, fatigued in a way they haven’t since she’d done cross-country her freshman year. Everything is numb and _hurts_ at the same time, her chest in stitches as she struggles to breathe, and still she does not cry, not yet, not until this is over.

Not until their -- her time has run out.

Her mind latches onto that -- to time -- as she puts one foot in front of the other and covers the home stretch toward the hospital where Daniel’s being looked after (not treated, she reminds herself, because they don’t know what’s wrong with him -- _can’t_ know, not after what Mother did to him). Magic has warped Regina’s sense of what’s considered normal for a person; time is no exception. She knows magic has an impact on the lifespan of a witch or warlock, knows that her kind live a lot longer than mortals do. Aunt Morgana had celebrated her two hundred and fiftieth birthday at the end of May right before she’d left for her sabbatical, and Regina knows that’s still considered relatively young for someone full-blooded. As it is, Regina is only half, which means she’ll live longer than the average mortal but not much, and under any other circumstances, she thinks she’d be a little justified in feeling sort of cheated.

But she doesn’t -- didn’t, because of Daniel, because _every last minute_ was still an entire lifetime for them both, and it didn’t _matter_ to her whether the odds were stacked against them or not.

At least she wouldn’t have been _alone_.

(At least she would have been loved.)

It’s _unfair_ , utterly and completely, and Regina knows that’s petulant, childish to a fault, but she can’t bring herself to really care as she stands at the edge of the walkway leading into the hospital entrance. The pain in her chest is a constant ache, now, heavy and weighted and spreading like fractals, and for a long few minutes, she feels rooted to the spot, unable to move.

And she is running, running, running out of time.

She will not waste it like this.

She draws in a breath, readies herself to take a step forward and stops, eyes darting up and around. She’s not sure where the hospital mounts each and every security camera but she’s knows they’re there, tucked up and away and hidden in shadow. She knows she can’t risk getting caught administering him the potion, particularly when no one will remember her part in all of this anyway, but the thought of using magic to modify memories beyond the effects of the potion isn’t one that sits well with her. Using magic against mortals is part of the reason why she even has to do this to begin with, even if Mother had been the one to --

Regina pushes the thought from her mind, trying desperately to keep her focus on the task at hand. Carefully, she directs a pointed finger at the hospital and mutters an incantation under her breath that she thinks (hopes) disables the cameras long enough for her to do what needs to be done. It’s only then that she takes a step forward, one foot in front of the other as she makes her way down the path to the double doors, and she’s still careful to keep her head bowed and low -- just in case. She finds herself grateful that she’d left her wristband on from her visit earlier this morning; it means she doesn’t have to go through the front desk again, means she doesn’t have to use more magic on mortals or leave any trace of herself behind.

( _Liar_ , her heart snaps, cold and sharp. _You’re leaving me here, too._ )

When she ducks into Daniel’s room in the ICU and shuts the door behind her, the room is both blessedly empty and almost as dark as it can possibly be. They can’t turn off any of their equipment, obviously, but they’ve turned off all overhead lights and pulled the curtains closed. His migraines must be getting worse, then; Regina knows how much the light has been bothering him. She’s grateful for their consideration, though -- both on Daniel’s behalf and her own. This way they’ll have privacy from any prying eyes at the nurses’ station, and she’ll only have to lock the door for the thirty seconds she’s actually giving him the potion.

For now, she leaves it unlocked and moves to the chair next to the bed, sinking down and gently setting her bag aside. She takes a breath to steady herself as she takes in his sleeping form, trying to mark any changes from this morning. He’s not intubated, at least, and the neck brace is gone, but she’s not entirely sure how they’re handling meals at the moment. He’s sleeping, at least, but she can tell by the way his face is pinched in pain that it’s not an easy rest. The ache that’s dissipated through her body coils back up and hits her hard in the center of her chest. Instinctively, she scoots the chair a little closer and reaches out for his hand, but she stops just shy of touching him, glancing up at the clock on the wall instead.

12:20.

She is nearly out of time.

Carefully, Regina turns her attention back to Daniel and gently takes his hand in hers, thumb stroking over his knuckles. She’s loathe to pull him from sleep, especially when she knows how much pain he’s in, what’s at risk, but she doesn’t have a choice. Well, she does, technically, but given how they’ve gotten to this point -- how much of this really is her fault (and how much of it isn’t) -- Regina refuses to make the same mistake again.

A thousand times was enough.

“Daniel,” she murmurs, reaching up her other hand to brush some of his hair away from his face. “Daniel, can you wake up? Please?”

It takes him a moment, maybe two, but he eventually responds to her gentle stroking and prodding and murmured words. A sharp inhale, tension in every muscle she can see, brow furrowed in what she knows is an effort to stem some of the stabbing sensation he’s feeling, but he _does_ wake, and though it takes a moment too long for his gaze to land and settle on her, when he looks at her, there’s no mistaking the recognition in his eyes. “R -- Regina,” he mumbles, his speech slow and slurred and stunted. “Wh’s wrong?” She blinks rapidly, confused for a moment, but he doesn’t leave her wondering long. Slowly, the hand that’s clasped with hers struggles to lift from the bed, shaking, and the touch of Daniel’s fingertips against her face as he tries (and mostly fails) to trace a path under her eye and down her cheek has her breath hitching in surprise. “You’re… upset.”

She barks out a light laugh at that, warm and wet as she removes his hand and smiles softly at him. Not even managing to keep her tears at bay this long could fool Daniel; he knows her too well for that. Still, she _will_ keep her composure long enough to get through this. She doesn’t want his last memory (short and lost and fleeting as it will be) of her to be in tears. “You’re… unwell,” she settles on, squeezing his hand gently. “Of course I’m upset.”

If he were more capable at the moment, she thinks he’d press the issue -- distract her to make her feel better. As it is, she thinks he’s giving her this one -- this license to be upset over him being unwell -- and it’s enough to tell her just how _exhausted_ he really is. So she finds herself unsurprised at the way he nods imperceptibly and lets his eyes slip shut, nuzzing gently into her hand. “Whr -- where’d you go?” he asks, light and airy and sleepy around the edges.

Her smile breaks into something a little less whole, now that he’s not watching her, and she brushes her fingers against his hairline in time with her thumb on his hand. “To get help.”

Daniel’s eyes open much too quickly at the admission, and he squeezes them shut again almost instantly, clearly still fighting off the last vestiges of a migraine. He opens them again after a long few seconds, heavy and lidded but locked with hers, and she can see the curiosity sparked in his eyes. “M -- m -- mag -”

“Magic, yes,” she whispers, not wanting him to overtax himself.

_”This is… magic,” he murmurs, voice low with awe and wonder as he glances around at the display of stars around the room. “This is -- you’re --” He stops, turns around to face her again, and there’s a curiosity to the spark in his eyes that has her hedging, nervous and uncertain. “You’re a witch,” he breathes._

_Regina swallows every warning down, down, down, clasps her hands in front of her and nods. “Yes,” she whispers, “I am.”_

_A beat, and then a smile is spreading onto Daniel’s face, warm and bright and lacking any sort of malice, and Regina half-throws herself into his arms, breath coming more easily as she wraps around him tight._

_And surrounded by stars, she thinks they both fall all over again._

For the beat of a breath, Regina can see the spark in his eyes transcend both space and time, and all at once they exist in the in-between -- before Mother’s magic had warped Daniel’s mind, and in the here and now, before Regina will use magic to mend it.

For that moment, she swears that time simply… stops.

But of course, it doesn’t, and the clock on the wall _tick-tick-tick_ s like an armed bomb, stealing the time it marks.

12:30.

“I made something for you,” she says, sniffing a little in a valiant effort to keep it together. “A potion -- it’ll help fix all of this. But…” Here, she trails off, worrying her lip between her teeth as they consider each other. But Daniel is patient where he knows he needs to be -- where Regina knows she can’t afford to be, not if she’s sticking to the plan. So she forces herself to take a quick breath and moves in a little closer, dropping her hand from his brow to cradle his jaw. “Keeping this from you was part of what got us into this mess,” she explains -- insists, practically pleading for him to understand. “I can help you, but I want you to tell me it’s okay. I need your permission -- I won’t do this without it, not like before, not anymore.”

(She does not -- will not tell him the cost, not when it’s not his to pay or bear.)

He holds her gaze, just for a moment, before his eyes are slipping shut again, but she hasn’t lost him to sleep, not yet. He shifts his head carefully in her hand, slow and gentle and clearly in spite of the pain he’s in, and the smile he graces her with is honestly probably more a result of his muscles relaxing than purposeful intent, but she takes it as one anyway, unable to fight the selfish impulse. He presses a soft kiss to the palm of her hand, tender to the last, and Regina feels it all the way down to her very soul. “I trust you,” Daniel sighs, surprisingly clear, and all Regina hears is _I love you_.

(She does not -- did not deserve him, in any realm.)

She takes it for the consent it is and carefully extracts herself away from him for a moment to dig around in her bag. When she unearths the bottle, the potion inside has changed from pink to clear, and even though she can sense the magic within it, she still has a twinge of doubt, like Mother -- Cora has gone back on her word or mislead her somehow. (Briefly, she bitterly thinks of Snow and the insipid girl’s inability to _keep her mouth shut_ , but that too, Regina pushes down and away, the thought too unimportant at the moment to warrant being a priority.) She casts a glance over at the door, just to be safe, before she pushes herself out of the chair and perches on the mattress next to him. “Can you… swallow?” she asks tentatively, hoping he doesn’t take it the wrong way. She thinks -- she hopes, anyway -- that he knows she doesn’t look at him as an invalid at the moment; she just… wants to be careful.

Daniel inhales, long and deep, before he’s adjusting against his pillow and opening his eyes, clearly trying to reclaim some sense of focus. The smile he offers her is lopsided at best, and it occurs to her then that even the few moments she’s kept him awake have drained what little reserves he has left. “They g’ve me s’me ice chips earlier,” he mumbles around a slight yawn. “Think I did okay w’th those.”

Regina returns his smile, equally crooked but also a little tight around the edges, and she’s quick to point a finger at the door to lock it before undoing the cap and pressing the bottle carefully into his hand. She adjusts his grip a little, making sure it’s secure before she lets go. The bottle doesn’t slip in his grasp, but he’s slow about trying to lift it closer, his hand trembling a little more violently the harder he tries. He exhales harshly, his face starting to pinch in pain, and his voice is tight when he speaks again. “C’n you --”

She’s wrapping her hand around his before he can even finish the request, anchoring her other hand at his elbow to help guide the bottle up to his mouth. She murmurs soothingly when she notices the way his neck is straining to lift from the pillow, a gentle _shh_ as she encourages him to relax and let her take the lead. She holds her breath, just for a few seconds while the first few sips slip past his lips, but he seems to handle them well, doesn’t pucker or sputter or push it away. He gets a few decent drinks in before he has to stop for more measured breaths, his eyes slipping shut in an effort to combat the stress, and he doesn’t protest at all when Regina gently pries the bottle from his hand and forces him to relax the rest of the way, letting her take over. Together, they find a rhythm that works for him -- a few sips here, a measured breath or two there -- and work in tandem until the bottle reaches empty.

(Resolutely, Regina ignores the sound of seconds ticking by.)

The breaths he takes once the bottle is empty are sharper, more shallow, and she gives him half a moment to gain his bearings while she deposits the empty bottle back in her bag. He’s lost a little color when she looks back at him, the exertion a bit too much, but his breathing comes back to rest quickly enough, and she thinks she hasn’t pushed him too far in the eleventh hour. When his eyes flutter open again, she finds them a little unfocused around the edges. “Do you know how l’ng it’ll take to work?” he asks, words starting to slur together again.

“Not too long,” she reassures him, heart thudding hard against her chest with every _tick-tick-tick_ of time.

“‘s it safe to sleep?”

She reaches up a hand to card her fingers through his hair and feels a little thrill of satisfaction at the pleased hum that passes his lips at her touch. “Probably,” she says. “I’m sure a little extra rest won’t hurt.”

His answering nod is barely there, and he’s already halfway gone, she can tell, fighting the instinct to let his eyes slip shut again. Clumsily, he stretches his hand out across the blanket to lace his fingers with hers, and it’s all she can do not to grip too-tight. “W -- will you stay?” he murmurs, and for a second he sounds so _much_ like himself -- warm and strong and sure even with the way he fights to form words. “Wa -- want you t’ be here wh’n I wake up again.”

Loss swells up like a wave in her chest, washing away every mark of time, but still she manages to keep her tears at bay, allowing only the sting of them at the back of her eyes. She kept this secret from him -- this piece of herself -- hidden for so long, and all it had done was bring them closer before Mother had forced it to tear them apart. Regina cannot bear to lie to him now, not after everything, but the truth is not -- has never been -- an option, at least not in its entirety.

(She can’t stomach the thought of the last look in his eyes being resentment.)

So it’s with love in her lungs that Regina bestows him with a warm smile and brings their hands up to rest over his beating heart. “I’m with you,” she promises, and it is every bit the truth she is allowed. “Always.”

There is no mistaking the love in Daniel’s eyes, and it’s there and gone as she finally loses him to sleep one last time. The breaths she takes are shaky and uneven as she waits, his heart picking up pace for the space of a second before coming down to rest. A few seconds more and color starts to return to his face, but it’s only when his hand goes lax in hers that Regina finally allows herself to flick her eyes up to the clock.

12:36, on the dot.

The tears are already welling in her eyes when she looks back down at him, chest heaving as she struggles to breathe, but she holds off a little longer, just enough to take him in like this -- alive and well and at peace -- and try to commit him to memory. The seconds tick down, down, down, love breaking and bleeding in her lungs as she leans down and presses her lips to his temple, marking this moment as their last. Slowly, her eyes slip shut, tears brimming on her lashes, but she holds on just a few seconds longer, breath tinged with love from her lungs. “I _love_ you,” she breathes against his skin, and this, she hopes -- _knows_ \-- is the mark she longs to last.

The second she pulls away from him and releases his hand, the tears are spilling wet and wild onto her cheeks, breath short and stilted as she pushes herself off of the bed and reaches half-blindly for her bag. She does not, cannot look back as she somehow stumbles her way toward the door, fingers fumbling with the handle for a moment before she remembers that she’d magically locked the door. Her magic feels clumsy coming out of her, curved and awkward even as it works properly, and she’s barely suppressing the volume of her impending sobs when she wrenches the door open and pulls it shut as quietly as she can behind her.

She’s startled into something resembling subdued when she glances up at the nurse seated at the main desk. The nurse’s eyes are cloudy, distant, and it’s then that Regina knows the side-effects of the magic in the potion are spreading; pretty soon, they will all forget she was ever here.

She won’t even be a memory.

That’s enough to draw her back under, her skin feeling warm and raw under the renewed onslaught of tears, and it’s all she can do to duck her head back down and walk briskly out of the ICU. She can hardly see straight as she tries to navigate her way back to the front entrance, vision swimming with tears that will not be held back anymore. She ends up giving up halfway there, smacking a hand against a wall for purchase, and the second she turns a corner into an empty hallway, Regina’s finger goes up in the air to magically transport herself home.

Her feet have barely hit the stone ground of the side garden before she’s pointing again, unlocking the french doors that lead into the kitchen so she doesn’t have to dig around for her keys. She’s _gasping_ for air when she crosses the threshold, book bag discarded carelessly on the kitchen floor as she stumbles forward, hands seeking and slipping for purchase against the tops of the kitchen chairs, the edges of island counter. She falls against the far counter with too much force, grips and spins and slides down, down, down to the floor, back pressed firmly against the lower cabinets.

And with the last bit of resolve she has left, Regina pulls her knees against her chest, bows her head, and _cries her heart out_ \-- lack of literal idiom interpretation be damned.


	3. Chapter 3

June bleeds into July, and in the thick heat of summer, Regina longs to watch Snow _burn_.

It’s a horrid thing to wish, she knows -- particularly given the history of their kind in Salem alone -- but if she’s being honest with herself (a difficult thing in and of itself at the moment), she doesn’t mean it _literally_. It’s just… After what happened with -- to Daniel, Regina’s felt a little… listless. It’s just her and Luna in the house now, too small to fill all of the empty spaces, and once she’d cried herself out over losing him, she’d felt all too hollow, like a chasm had formed in his absence. Carrying around associated ache just _hurt_ too much, frankly, and without it, anger has filled its place and directed any scars that ache left behind.

So yes, she’s been feeling particularly… witchy since -- since what happened, and while it had been all too easy to push down her fury at Cora -- at Mother -- the reality in the aftermath makes matters much more complicated. Mother’s certainly been a bit more... attentive in the last few weeks than she has been in the last two years -- since she left, honestly. But where Regina would have welcomed it before -- longed for it, really -- she has no desire for it now. She’s resentful, to be sure, but that, like ache, gets shoved into a corner and buried beneath her anger. The difference is that unlike ache, Regina can’t use her anger to direct her resentment into acting out against her mother. Mother -- Cora had more than proven her power when she’d flung such a careless (calculated) curse Daniel’s way. And with her position on the Council as well as Aunt Morgana’s absence leaving Regina without a buffer or an ally, any attempt Regina could make to express her frustration and displeasure at Mother’s meddling would probably be subdued before she could ever really get very far.

She’s leaving Zelena out of this for the time being. They’re both still on thin ice where the Council is concerned, and while Zelena definitely shares some of Regina’s frustrations with their mother, she has also positioned herself more firmly in the middle of things than Regina would have expected, back in the spring. Zelena’s trying to make the most of her freedom now that she knows she’s not going to lose it (at least not because of some archaic rule, anyway), but Regina admits that she was honestly a little surprised when part of that meant that Zelena wanted to try forging some sort of real relationship with their mother. Regina’s… not all that hopeful in that respect, but far be it from her to stop Zelena from trying. Still, Zelena’s desire means that it counts her out as an ally in this particular instance -- at least if Regina wants to salvage their own relationship.

And, well, that leaves Regina with only one direction left in which to steer her anger ( _one_ , she tells herself firmly, because the only other alternative available is one she has to pull on ache to indulge in). If not for Snow, Regina would be preparing for her first semester at college _with_ Daniel instead of without him.

As it is, Regina is alone, and there is no one to talk her out of partaking in a little petty revenge.

She’s smart about it, though, careful and calculated in the way she’s sure Mother was when trying to plan her little sabotage. She knows that Snow attends a boarding school in the other realm most of the year, and she’d gotten word through the grapevine that her bratty little step-sister was taking the equivalent of summer courses this year. So Snow too, is alone, or at the very least is away from the prying and protective eyes of her father ( _parents_ , the back of her mind tries to correct, but Regina pushes that down and away too, refusing to entertain the idea that Mother would act in the best interests of her step-daughter over her own flesh and blood). And Regina, well -- Regina would be a fool not to take advantage of such a situation rife with opportunity.

The spells she enacts are _harmless_ in all honestly -- pranks, really. None of them have any real teeth to them, nothing that would particularly hurt, but Snow is ten, her life charmed in practically every which way, and Regina figures that even the most mild inconvenience will probably prove infuriatingly irritating to her step-sister.

(She does not, under any circumstances, allow herself to give credence to the thought that she might not have the energy to try and make things worse.)

So Regina disguises her vengeance in pretty packages -- a health-conscious little care package; shades of blue; an extra pair of eyes searching for mistakes; a postcard with the inscription _weather’s great, wish you were here!_ \-- and enjoys the little thrill of satisfaction she gets at the mere thought of Snow’s potential indignance and temper tantrums. Outside of her little… gifts, Regina spends most of her summer preparing for her first semester at the nearby university and revitalizing the garden out in the side yard. Her literal green thumb has long since disappeared, but she’s proven to be surprisingly adept in the gardening department in recent months -- a development that has Zelena amused to no end.

It’s here, in the flowerbeds of the side yard with her knees dug into the dirt, that Regina finds herself on an afternoon in late July when she hears the tell-tale boom-clap of thunder and lightning from inside the house indicating the arrival of someone from the Other Realm in the linen closet upstairs. She pauses in her work, small shovel still in hand as she leans back and wipes the sweat from her brow, nose wrinkling in confusion. It’s unusual that someone would show up unannounced, particularly now that Aunt Morgana’s on sabbatical; it’s about as rude as someone showing up at her front door unannounced and uninvited.

It occurs to her, possibly a fraction of a second too late, that this might be _Mother_ , who would disregard such etiquette where her own family is concerned, particularly in the mortal realm. Regina’s heart stops for the space of half a moment, breath seizing in her chest at the thought. For all that Mother has hovered since the Daniel incident, she hasn’t actually come to visit, and the thought of her being here now is not one Regina is at all prepared for. Quickly, she shakes her head and forces air back into her lungs, mentally berating herself to get it together before Mother gets downstairs.

She barely manages to set the shovel down, push herself to her feet, and dust the dirt from her knees before her guest appears in the kitchen, though, and Regina impresses even herself at being able to conceal most of her surprise in a delicately arched eyebrow at the sight of Snow storming toward her with all of the force of a flurry. She hardly has the chance to do more than settle her hands on her hips before Snow is mirroring the pose in the dead center of the kitchen, nostrils flaring in obvious anger. “ _Alright_ ,” Snow bites out, clearly barely containing her rage, “ _enough_.”

Regina purses her lips, determined not to let her step-sister get under her skin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she sniffs indifferently, breaking eye contact so she can tug her gardening gloves off.

“I think I’ve put up with enough of your -- your _temper tantrums_ ,” Snow declares, clearly trying to sound authoritative. Regina only half manages to suppress a snort of derision as she tosses her gloves aside and makes to move inside. There is a part of her, however small and petty, that wishes she _weren’t_ so determined to come across as unmiffed; she’d love to show Snow what one of her _real_ temper tantrums looks like.

Snow isn’t deterred, though. “I let it go when you sent that bushel of apples -- even though I _know_ that you know I’m allergic. I didn’t say anything when you enacted that spell that gave me this little makeover even though it’s against the school’s dress code,” she says, gesturing to the admittedly awful bleach-burnt baby blue hair she’s sporting. Regina’s lips twist into a wry smile as she brushes past Snow and makes her way to the kitchen sink to wash her hands; she’ll have to thank Zelena for that one. “I didn’t even rat you out when you made my arithmancy homework disappear -- in spite of the fact that I had to summon a _troll_ to help me locate it and then _give it back_ when he requested a _betrothal_ as payment.”

Regina does deign to glance back up at her at that, equal parts bemused and maybe a little horrified at the thought that someone would make that request of a ten year old. She reaches for a towel to dry her hands and thinks that all things considered, it’s a little curious that her most recent spell is the thing that Snow apparently won’t stand for, though Regina thinks that maybe this is just the metaphorical straw that’s broken the camel’s back.

Snow’s continued tirade only serves to prove her right. “I have tolerated breaking out in hives. I have tolerated the tangles. I have tolerated a smelly troll trying to kiss me. I have tolerated having to do my homework _twice_ , and I have tolerated both instances of detention my teachers gave me because of your antics. But _this_?” she seethes, gesturing to the cloud hanging over her head perpetually cascading snow onto her hair and shoulders. “This is ridiculous, Regina, and honestly? Beneath you. I’m cold. I’m wet. And _it’s not funny_.”

And at once, Regina understands: Snow doesn’t like being made fun of.

But then Snow says, “I’ve had enough,” and Regina finds that she has very little compassion to spare.

“ _You’ve_ had enough?” Regina counters, voice dangerously low as she narrows her eyes and grips the hand towel tight. Snow raises her eyebrows as if to say, _yeah, what of it?_ , and Regina works her jaw in an effort to keep her temper under control. “I’ll tell you what,” Regina offers, clipped, “when someone does something that completely rips your world apart, then you can come talk to me.” She tosses the hand towel onto the counter carelessly and brushes past Snow quickly, making for the stairs just off the kitchen.

Snow grabs her arm before she can get far enough away, and Regina whirls around quickly, glaring pointedly at the point of contact as white begins to dust her arm. “I didn’t _do_ anything,” Snow protests. Regina snaps her eyes up, equal parts incredulous and _furious_ , and she will not cause an earthquake, she won’t, she won’t. “Your _mother_ was the one who cast the spell that made that mortal --”

“ _That mortal_ ,” Regina snaps, yanking her arm away, “was someone I happened to care about who did _not_ deserve what she did to him. _And_ ,” she adds, advancing on her step-sister enough that Snow stumbles a few steps backward toward the still open french doors leading to the side yard, “my mother wouldn’t have known about my relationship with _that mortal_ if _you_ had managed to keep your mouth shut when I confided in you after graduation.”

Something shifts in Snow’s eyes at that -- guilt, Regina thinks (hopes, _needs_ ) -- but it’s gone almost as soon as it appeared, replaced with a fire of her own. “And _you_ ,” Snow sasses, standing her ground and arching up on her toes a little to appear a little taller, “are barking up the wrong tree.”

It hits Regina like a punch to the gut, knocking the wind out of her and coiling up, twisting tight. Her stomach flips, spine _zing_ ing to the point that she’s doubling over in pain, and the gasp that’s building up in her lungs never quite leaves her mouth as her eyes squeeze shut and she curls in and down, down, down --

(Vaguely, she thinks she hears Snow’s sharp gasp of surprise, but Regina hardly spares it a second thought, too consumed by her own pain to care.)

When the pain finally recedes enough for her to focus, she’s on the kitchen floor, overwarm and grateful for the cool tile beneath her. She winces a little as she tries to push herself into a sitting position, but she barely manages to get up on her hands before she’s slipping and falling with a disgruntled _oomph_ , legs and arms feeling oddly uncoordinated. Annoyed, Regina begrudgingly reaches out a hand in silent expectation, waiting for Snow to help her up off of the floor. It’s the least she can do, as far as Regina’s concerned, considering her spell is the reason Regina’s down here in the first place.

But after a long moment, Regina still finds herself on the floor without assistance, so it’s with another annoyed huff that she opens her eyes and glares upward.

She’s startled when she finds herself alone in the kitchen, but the thing that catches her attention more is how different everything looks. She feels… lower to the ground than she thinks she should, the table seeming impossibly out of reach, and not even reaching out her paw seems to make much of a difference.

Wait, what?

Too quickly, she glances down at her hands only to find _paws_ covered in _fur_ , bracelet still wrapped around her left one, and she can’t even quite manage to pull them against herself to examine the rest of her body. The floor is suddenly ten times more slippery than before, her (freakishly long, what the _fuck_ ) nails scratching irritatingly against the tile as she tries again to push herself to her feet (four of them, she has _four feet_ ). Again, she slips, stumbles and falls before she can even get all the way upright, and for a minute, all she can do is half-glance back at the rest of her body to see the rest of her transformation, tail and all.

She has a _tail_.

She opens her mouth as she turns back around, ready to _scream_ at her step-sister in absolute fury (and wonders, for one wild minute, if she can still cause an earthquake like this), but even that feels different now, her tongue long and thick and clumsy in her mouth. She growls, low and in the back of her throat, and licks her lips, ready to try again. This time, she manages something that sounds like half of a word, but it’s rough around the edges, deeper and full in its timbre. She tries again, mouth trying to form morphemes, and all she gets for her trouble is a bark.

Oh god.

“You _brat_ ,” Regina says, somewhere between a bark and a yip. “You turned me into a _dog_.”

There’s a rustling sound coming from somewhere outside, though it’s not like Regina can go investigate it seeing as how she’s still having trouble figuring out how to be upright on _four legs_. Snow doesn’t respond for a moment or two, but when she does, her voice comes from the side garden. “Oh, _poor you_ ,” Snow throws back, voice sounding oddly… muffled. “From where I’m standing, you definitely got the better end of this mess.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Regina barks ( _barks_ , oh god, she’s a dog, she’s a fucking _dog_ ), trying (and failing) once again to at least push herself into a sitting position. “God, okay look, can you just -- can you please come back in here and help me at least sit up?”

“Sorry,” Snow grits out, still weirdly muffled. “I can’t actually do that right now.”

“Why not?” Regina huffs.

“Come see for yourself.”

Regina rolls her eyes (or she thinks she does, anyway, it’s hard to tell like this) but doesn’t bother pursuing the argument. Slowly, she wiggles on the kitchen floor, trying to get herself into a position where she knows she’ll be able to balance her weight evenly once she manages to get upright. She concentrates a little harder and focuses on her front paws (seriously?) first, alternating between moving them back one at a time in conjunction with her back ones. When she finally manages to get herself into a sitting position, she can feel her legs starting to slip and spread out, eagle style, but she leans her weight forward onto her front paws just enough to catch herself. She holds the position for a minute, feeling absurdly awkward in her own body, before she leans her weight forward a little more and kicks her back legs up from under her. That, too, takes a little adjusting, the weight of her body on her… pads? paws? oddly uncomfortable.

And then she’s standing, on all four legs, and for someone six weeks shy of starting her undergraduate education, Regina finds that she is _ridiculously_ proud of this feat.

Actually _walking_ proves to be more of a challenge still, but she takes her time, slips and stumbles and resolutely does not fall again as she tries to figure out how to coordinate all of her limbs together in time. Accounting for her nails takes a little longer than she’s proud of -- she figures there’s got to be _some_ sort of advantage to these gargantuan things -- but she manages to (not so quietly) figure it out, and she surprises even herself when she manages to make the transition from tile to brick with ease.

Out in the side yard, however, Snow is still nowhere to be found, and Regina finds herself extremely irritated that her pain of a step-sister is pulling her --

Nope. _Nope._

“Where are you?” Regina calls, glancing around the patio.

“I’m _right here_ ,” Snow snaps, sounding equally as irritated, and the second Regina turns her head in the direction of Snow’s voice, she realizes instantly what has happened.

Her little step-sister has been transformed into a tree -- not just any tree, though, an _apple tree_ , at that -- and magic, it seems, has claimed another idiom for its own.

Regina stares at… _her_ rather blankly for a long moment before she hangs her head down low and bursts out laughing.

It comes out more like an odd, whining yipping sound than anything else, but Regina cannot bring herself to care if she sounds stupid because this is _priceless_.

“It’s _not_ funny,” Snow snaps sharply, and it occurs to Regina only then that the reason Snow’s voice sounds muffled is because _she doesn’t have a mouth_.

This doesn’t come close to the pain Regina has carried around this summer, but she will _take it_.

“Yes, it is,” Regina chuckles, half wheezing.

“Oh sure,” Snow deadpans, and god, Regina’s not even sure where to _look_ at this tree in order to find some sort of semblance of Snow’s face. “Hilarious. Totally what I needed after everything else you put me through in the last couple of weeks.” _That_ gets a reaction out of Regina; she snorts a little in derision, jaw jumping in annoyance, but she bites back any argument or retort, not wanting to give Snow the satisfaction. “As much as I’m sure you’re enjoying this, unless you want to spend the rest of your life as a _dog_ , can you please figure out how to change us back?”

“ _Me_?” Regina asks incredulously. “Why is it my job to clean up the mess _you_ created?”

“Okay, setting aside the fact that _this mess_ isn’t my fault either,” Snow drawls, and Regina throws (tries, anyway) daggers at her, “my feet are _literally rooted to this spot_. I can’t actually go anywhere to do anything that might help reverse this.”

“Implying you could do anything helpful even if you could move,” Regina mutters, but she resigns herself to Snow’s immobility at the moment with a heavy sigh. “Fine, I’ll go find Luna and see if we can’t find something in the spellbook.”

“ _Thank_ you,” Snow sniffs, her tone dripping with disdain, and if Regina had better control over her limbs and coordination right now, she’d go dig a bunch of holes around Snow’s base just to spite her.

Later, perhaps.

For now, Regina turns and makes her way back inside to the staircase just off the kitchen. Looking up at the ascent from this low is a bit… daunting, she’ll admit, but here, she’s less afraid to try and fail; at least Snow can’t see her this far into the house. The process of climbing the stairs is admittedly slow and rather arduous -- it requires the same odd sort of alternating, coordination movement of all four limbs from before -- but climb she does, and without incident at that.

Still, she’s not quite used to being this low to the ground or her vision being this narrow, and she only just manages to catch sight of Luna curled up on top of the hamper, sleeping, before Regina reaches the top of the stairs. So Regina turns at the upper landing instead of making a beeline for her bedroom and finds herself grateful that whatever type of dog she’s turned into is at least big enough to reach the top of the hamper with her nose. Trying to balance on her back -- hind? legs seems like a nightmare at the moment, even if she could use the basket for purchase. “Luna,” she prompts, her voice sounding a little gravelly again. Luna doesn’t so much as twitch an ear at her, and Regina has to force enough presence of mind to bite back an actual growl or bark.

(Somewhere in the back of her mind, she thinks that maybe she’s inhabiting her new -- temporary body with more ease than she really wants. What if she _chases Luna up a tree_?)

“Luna,” Regina tries again, but the infernal cat sleeps on, oblivious to any possible disruptions. With a slight huff, Regina rests her chin on top of the hamper and shuffles forward a bit, gently nosing Luna’s face. “ _Luna_.”

It’s the wet nose to the face that does it, Regina thinks, and Luna wakes with a somewhat startled yawn, blinking blearily until her vision comes into focus. Regina -- well, she’s not sure if she can even really do anything resembling arching her eyebrows in this body, so she settles for widening her eyes a little in what she hopes in an expectant expression.

It takes Luna exactly three seconds to process the sight in front of her, and she’s backing away with sharp claws and a wild sounding _hiss_ that makes Regina flinch and stumble back a few steps. “ _In the name of Merlin’s fucking_ \-- get back, beast! Regina! Regina, there’s --”

“Oh my god,” Regina groans, snuffing a little in annoyed derision as she plops back down into a sitting position. “Can you tone down the theatrics, drama queen? I’m _right here_.”

Luna stops abruptly, clearly startled, but Regina notices the way her claws retract almost immediately, even if she hasn’t quite managed to get rid of the look of disbelief on her face. “ _Regina_?” she questions, moving back across the hamper but not hopping down just yet. “You’re…”

“A dog, yes, thank you, Captain Obvious,” Regina drawls, opting to stay put just so she doesn’t accidentally freak Luna out again.

Luna’s expression shifts from disbelief to curiosity in the space of a second, and if Regina were at all in the mood to match wits with Luna at the moment, she’d almost consider making the joke just for the sake of it. But she holds her tongue and waits Luna out, watches carefully as Luna jumps down off of the hamper and approaches her with caution. Her steps are light, agile as she stalks her way around Regina in a circle, clearly surveying her. Regina follows her with her own eyes for a few seconds, but craning her neck back that far throws off her already precarious balance, so she keeps her face forward and waits for Luna to come back around. “You know,” Luna ventures as she comes up around the other side, clearly choosing her words very carefully, “I’m all for a post heartbreak makeover, darling, but doesn’t this seem a bit… much?”

Regina only just _barely_ bites back a growl, annoyance giving way to ache and curbing into anger quickly at the mere allusion. “Hilarious,” she bites out. “It’s an idiom interpretation, genius. My lovely little step-sister decided to pay me a visit to thank me for all those gifts I sent her, and this happened.”

Luna comes to a stop in front of her but doesn’t sit down. “What happened to her?”

Regina sniffs a little, her nails scratching lightly against the hardwood floors as her body wiggles of its own volition. “She’s bearing the fruits of this little stunt too, don’t worry.”

Luna narrows her eyes, clearly discerning, but she’s silent for only a moment before offering up a reply. “She’s… a tree,” Luna surmises. “She accused you of barking up the wrong tree?”

Regina’s jaw ticks and jumps in irritation, but she manages to keep her composure otherwise. “And while Snow’s loose lips come as a surprise to _absolutely no one_ , I’m not all that concerned with that little aspect at the moment,” Regina sighs. “Can you help us figure out how to reverse this or not?”

Something flashes in Luna’s eyes at that, a sharp flare against her yellows, but whatever she may be thinking or feeling, she doesn’t share. “A simple _please_ would have sufficed,” Luna drawls, brushing past her to move toward the bedroom. Regina very wisely does not offer up any sort of retort and makes to follow her, balance coming a little more easily this time. “To the spellbook, then. Let’s see what we can find.”

* * * * *

What they find is _nothing_.

It’s not for a lack of trying. Between Regina’s ability to move heavier things and Luna’s adept paw at turning pages for her, they both manage to peruse the pages of the spellbook for a good couple of hours to try and find something that will reverse the idiom’s spell. They read and discuss and discern until Regina’s voice goes hoarse and her vision starts to blur, and in spite of their lack of progress, Luna suggests a much-needed break.

Downstairs, though, Snow is immediately interrogating them about what they’ve been doing, and it’s so starkly irritating in that moment that Regina honestly can’t handle her just then. She ventures out into the backyard instead and leaves Luna to deal with her pain-in-the-ass step-sister, and while there’s a part of her that feels a little bad about forcing Luna to deal with Snow, Regina can’t bring herself to feel bad enough. And Luna, to her credit, doesn’t complain about it once, though Regina can tell even on her way out of the kitchen that Snow is already testing Luna’s patience.

In the end, Snow somehow manages to convince Luna to send a message via Toaster Mail to her father and Cora letting them know that she’s “spending some time with Regina,” and if they could, please, let her summer instructors know she’ll be back soon. It’s a thin excuse, threadbare at best, and Regina’s sure there’ll be hell to pay for skipping out on summer classes regardless of the reason, but there is a part of her, however begrudging, that is a little grateful for her step-sister’s foresight. The message will probably pacify her -- Snow’s -- their parents for the time being, enough to keep them at bay so they don’t come asking questions, or worse, come to “visit.”

(Regina cannot, under any circumstances, handle seeing Mother right now -- cursed canine or not.)

All in all, it takes a good _two days_ for Regina and Luna to pore over the relevant pages of the spellbook only to come up empty-handed. This time, Regina is the one to suggest sending a message via Toaster Mail -- this time to Aunt Morgana -- to see if she can at least steer them in the right direction if she won’t return from her sabbatical to help. It’s just shy of desperate, Regina knows, but it’s the only option she’s got. She doesn’t really have… contacts in the Other Realm ( _friends_ , the back of her mind supplies, and Regina squashes the annoying, self-pitying thought down with all of the ferocity of a puppy). Anyone she does know is family, and Regina knows she can’t get any one of them or the Witches’ Council involved without Cora being aware of it. Not for the first time in this whole ordeal, Regina finds herself loathing her mother’s position of power in her -- their world, and all she can do is hope that Aunt Morgana pulls through.

Meanwhile, the three of them are left to their own devices to figure how to simply _exist_ for a few more days with two of them in unusual forms. For all that she’s approaching the end of her second century in her sentence as a feline, Luna’s ability to adapt to certain situations is not without its gaps. She’s not human anymore, after all, which means figuring out something as simple as a can opener is not within the realm of possibility for either of them at the moment. The best she can manage is knocking over the bag of dry food for easier access and offering to share both it and her automatic water dispenser with Regina for the time being. And Regina’s not exactly in a position to look a gift horse in the mouth (what would the interpretation of _that_ idiom look like, she wonders), but she can _barely_ stomach the dry food Luna offers her, and she only holds out for about a day.

Snow, however, proves to be rather useful in this department, surprisingly enough. It seems that not even _being_ an apple tree will allow her to escape her rather absurd allergy, so she spends a good portion of her days during the week that she’s there… well, _sneezing_ , for lack of a better way to describe it. She can only really move her branches, and even then all that manages to do is cause leaves to rustle and fall to the ground, littering the side garden and patio with foliage. Her allergies seem to act up more around high noon, and the sheer force of her “sneezes” causes a handful of apples to drop against the bricks with a tell-tale _plunk_. Regina, in the space of those few days, learns to listen for it, grateful at least that her transformation has improved her hearing, and she finds she can stomach the discarded apples much better than Luna’s dry food. It’s not as if Snow _needs_ them, anyway, since she’s allergic -- and _how do they even feed a tree, anyway_?

Still, for all of the hazards and annoyances of being a dog (figuring out how to do her business like a lady in the backyard is both mortifying and squirm worthy), Regina finds that she much prefers it to being a _bee_ (learning how to fly without a broomstick was significantly less fun). And, well, admittedly, the fact that she is a dog and Snow is something altogether uninteresting, immobile, and allergic to herself helps take off some of the edge. In the first handful days when they’re not flipping through the spellbook and trying to find a way to reverse the spell, Regina indulges in a little more petty revenge just to irritate her step-sister further. It’s a little mean, perhaps, considering Snow can’t really do much of anything to stop her other than haphazardly fling apples in her direction, but Regina is currently a _dog_ (and a rather cute one at that, given the glimpse she’d caught of herself in the mirror). If she can’t indulge in a little reckless behavior now, she doesn’t know when the hell she can. So she makes a point to walk through the side garden often in those first few days if only to rub it in Snow’s face that she can walk around and Snow can’t, and once Regina starts eating the fallen apples, she puts her mammoth nails to good use and digs a few holes around the base of Snow’s… trunk to bury the cores.

Snow’s increased irritation makes Regina’s dirty paws worth it.

But even annoying her step-sister starts to lose its appeal halfway through the week, and Regina resorts to retreating into things she still _can_ do in this body. She can’t really go much of anywhere on her own without running the risk of getting caught and sent somewhere, and the whole lack of opposable thumbs thing eliminates a good chunk of her hobbies and idle activities. She can’t go back to gardening (privately laments that she was petulant enough to destroy the dirt in the garden -- that’s going to be a nightmare and a half to try and get back into place without magic). Books are out as well, too much at risk of being ripped or soiled as a result of her efforts to turn the pages. And Regina is not going to sink so far into the mentality of her body as to _chase squirrels across the backyard_ (or worse, harass the mail person), so she’s left with very little to do during the days of that week other than walk around the yard and sleep and thank Aunt Morgana to, well, Merlin, she supposes, for having the foresight to get a remote for the television that has buttons big enough for Regina to use without incident in her current form.

It’s where she is on day five -- curled up on the rug in the living room watching a rerun of _I Dream of Jeannie_ \-- when Luna wanders in and hops up onto the couch, perching daintily on the arm. “Still no word from your aunt?”

“No,” Regina sighs, rolling onto her side to get more comfortable. “I’ve been considering pulling out the family tree to see who else might be able to help without running the risk of my -- Snow’s parents finding out. I don’t think we can keep her here much longer than a week without arousing suspicion.”

“A back-up plan is probably a good idea,” Luna muses. “I’ve actually been thinking about that myself -- about a way to reverse this whole business.”

“And?”

Luna hesitates for a long moment, clearly contemplating something, and it’s not until Regina flicks her gaze over in Luna’s direction that her ward finally speaks up. “This time last year,” she ventures, “there was that unfortunate little incident with another one of those idioms -- the one with the bee.”

“I remember,” Regina snorts, diverting her attention back to the television set. “Why is this relevant?”

“You did eventually turn back,” Luna reminds her. “Once your aunt sorted out what exactly the idiom was and how you’d gotten yourself into that mess, all it took was committing to dropping a few of your extra classes and clubs for you to turn back.”

“So?”

Luna _tsk_ s a little under her breath, barely there, but Regina hears it where she wouldn’t as a human. “ _So_ ,” Luna says pointedly, “doing the opposite of the idioms seems to be one of the ways to reverse their effects. It happened again this past spring, with your other sister, didn’t it?”

“Shouldn’t you be talking to Snow then?” Regina mutters snidely. “She’s the one who enacted this stupid spell in the first place.”

“She _verbalized_ the idiom enchantment,” Luna corrects, and the chastising gets under Regina’s skin enough that she forces herself back up into an upright position on the floor. “It wouldn’t have taken effect if it didn’t find truth in it.”

Regina narrows her eyes to the point of being just shy of shooting daggers in Luna’s direction. “And what is _that_ supposed to mean?”

Luna draws in a deep breath, chest puffing a little in what is clearly an attempt to make herself seem bigger than she actually is. It’s half-instinct, Regina knows, something Luna can’t entirely help. A handful of days as a bee and now a dog have taught Regina that there are certain things in animal transformation that can’t be helped. Luna’s particular variety of feline, it seems, finds foes instead of friends in canines. But it’s more than that, here; it’s a mark of patience tried and wearing thin, an indicator that Luna has been holding back. “It _means_ ,” Luna says, nails digging into the arm of the couch just a little, “that perhaps your… _charming_ little step-sister may have had a point. Maybe you _are_ barking up the wrong tree.”

Slowly, Regina pushes herself into a sitting position and turns to face Luna properly, the television long forgotten in the background. “ _Excuse me_?”

“I’m just saying,” Luna sniffs airily, “that maybe you should consider placing the blame where it really belongs -- with your mother.”

Regina suppresses a low growl in the back of her throat, but it’s a very near thing. “In case you’ve forgotten, my _mother_ ,” she bites out, “is a member of the Witches’ Council. Directing any ire at her isn’t exactly an _option_ , Luna. _And_ ,” she adds, pushing herself up on all fours in a much more practiced manner, “if you think for one second that I am going to _apologize_ to that selfish brat after the hell I’ve been suffering _because of her_ , then --”

“Alright, Regina,” Luna snaps, glaring down at her pointedly. “I have been awfully supportive and understanding during your whole little… nervous breakdown after what happened to Daniel, and need I remind you that _I did not have to be_?” A breath startles out of Regina’s lungs, the angry growl on its wings, and if she were any more basal about all of this, she thinks she’d be tempted to bare her teeth. “Morgana was the one in charge of your care, not me, but I have tried to fill her ridiculous little shoes this summer regardless of that fact out of the _goodness of my heart_ \--”

“Oh, don’t make it sound like you’ve been so _noble_ ,” Regina spits, hardly sparing a lick of embarrassment for the way she drools a little. “What would the _former_ heiress of Mars know about being someone’s _caretaker_ , anyway?”

The words are out of her mouth before she can even _try_ to remember her better judgement, scathing and unkind, and she watches it land in the center of Luna’s chest, the breath startled from her lungs now, instead. But Luna too, it seems has built up her own defenses for this conversation, and beyond the breath, the only sign she gives of being hurt by Regina’s words is the ever so slight narrowing of her eyes. She’s quiet for a very long, pointed moment, but when she speaks, there is nothing but contempt in her tone. “You know, Regina,” she says, voice dangerously low, “if all you want to do is sit here and be a _bitch_ , far be it from me to stop you.”

And without another _word_ , Luna is leaping off of the couch and trotting through the dining room into the kitchen, head held high.

With anger and ache boiling just beneath her skin, Regina clumsily clicks the television off and retreats into the backyard to dig more holes.

* * * * *

It’s a few hours shy of what would normally be dinner time on day six when Regina finally breaks.

Her bracelet is missing.

She knows for a fact that she’d still been wearing it after she’d been transformed, remembers marveling at the way it managed to stay put even as she padded around the house and yard. But she’s done a fair amount of walking -- a fair amount of _digging_ all week, and she honestly can’t recall the last time she remembers seeing it on her wrist -- paw. It could have slipped off anywhere, and Regina doesn’t even know where to _begin_ looking for it.

This time when she retreats, Regina climbs the stairs wearily and holes herself up in her room. She clambers onto her chair, chin tucked against the top of her desk so she can see the framed picture of her and Daniel she has perched there, and for the first time in _weeks_ , Regina takes a deep breath and tries lets her anger simmer and fade. In its wake, all she is left with is the ache she’d tried to bury on the kitchen floor, and between two lungs, she finds it very, very hard to breathe.

God, how she _misses_ him.

She misses the cold sting of air at night games when she’d sit in the bleachers cheering him on, a blanket curled around her shoulders. She misses the gentle warmth of his hand against the small of her back when he’d take her for riding lessons at his family’s stables. She misses the hours spent in the library crafting papers and studying for finals, misses the way his leg would brush against hers beneath the table. She misses lunch dates at the edge of the fountain, misses his mouth on hers and the lyrical lilt of his laugh. She misses the way his heart was always far too big for his own good.

Right now, though, the thing she thinks she misses most of all is the way the stars had caught and sparkled in his eyes when she’d owned up to being a witch. She misses the way it had felt to be loved, then, before it all fell to pieces, and more than anything, she misses the way he’d treated her and her magic as something reverent.

There’s a part of her, however small, however begrudging, that remembers seeing that in Snow, too, after graduation. Regina can count on one hand the number of times she and Snow have spent time together in person, however short, but graduation had been different. Graduation had come on the heels of Regina’s birthday and the family reunion in Atlantis, after the whole debacle with Zelena and the injunction with the Witches’ Council. Dinner with family in the Other Realm last month had been a rather tense, awkward affair, but Snow had seemed far more interested in getting to know _both_ of her step-sisters than she ever had previously (though, to be fair, she hadn’t actually known much of Zelena before that point, if anything at all). For a full-blooded witch brought up in the Other Realm, Snow had seemed genuinely interested and impressed with Regina’s stories about the mortal realm, and Regina, well. Regina had found comfort in being able to properly share both worlds with someone for a change; Zelena, bless her, was still a little condescending toward mortals, and Daniel hadn’t known the truth at the time.

And the thing is, Regina thinks Snow had seen that -- the desire to bridge the gap and find balance in the in-between. Or, she’d _thought_ so, anyway, because it had been the only way she’d managed to make sense of Snow going back on her word and telling Cora about Daniel. It’d been the start of every self-defense Snow had tried to mount -- _I was only trying to help_ \-- but Regina would never let it get farther than that. She didn’t need to, especially after Cora -- after _Mother_ had launched her surreptitious little attack.

It’s why it’d been easier to direct all of her anger and resentment at Snow: she’d been genuine in trying to do something kind, to help, and in the end all her actions accomplished was getting Regina ( _and Daniel_ , the back of her mind nudges, careful and riddled with guilt all at once) hurt. Mother -- Mother had only ever aimed to hurt her (hurt him, hurt _them_ ), and she’d done it under the guise of endeavoring to be _kind_.

Anger and ache churn like bile in the back of her throat and Regina swallows them both down, her pain burning and blistering its way down.

For the first time in _weeks_ , she wishes she could cry.

All at once, Regina feels five years old all over again (well, in human years, anyway) in a way that’s very different than the petulance she’s been indulging in over the last few weeks. She’s gained wisdom with age, sure, has a better understanding of the world and the way things work and why people behave the way the do at times. But this -- this isn’t something she think she will ever really understand, and in her mother’s absence, all Regina is left to do is wonder _why_. Because that -- that’s a thing she’d buried down deep too, a very long time ago, naive and lonely and longing for something lost.

And it’s there, in fathoms deep, that Regina breaks the barrier down.

What happened to Daniel was not Snow’s fault.

This time, the transformation is almost the opposite of what it’d been before. She still feels that sort of punch to the chest she did before, but it doesn’t hurt this time, doesn’t linger. In a way, it almost feels like a wave, a cresting ebb and flow that spreads up and out from her head to her toes. Her muscles relax, joints popping back into place as her spine straightens out and her nails recede, fur disappearing from her skin. But with her human form comes the ability to _feel_ so much more acutely, and by the time she’s fully changed back, she’s unsurprised to find tears already welling in her eyes, her hands shaking as she reaches out a hand for the picture frame.

“ _Daniel_ ,” she breathes, and her voice is not the same.

She doesn’t know how long she sits there, thumb stroking over the edges of the wooden frame, but she starts in her chair a little when she hears a voice behind her. “Regina?”

She swallows hard around the lump in her throat and retracts her hand, turning slightly in her chair to glance over her shoulder in the direction of the door. “Snow,” she acknowledges as she clears her throat, not quite able to look her in the eye.

Snow is unusually _quiet_ for a long moment, shuffling her weight from one leg to the other. It occurs to Regina that she’s probably getting used to not only having proper legs again, but actually being able to _move_ , and while Regina knows she’ll probably have her own awkward transitional period back into humanity, she’s not as reluctant to admit, now, that Snow definitely got the worse end of the deal here. “Is this -- did you hear back from your aunt?” Snow asks finally. “The one who went on that trip? Did she help you with the spell to change us back?”

Regina shakes her head but it’s slight, probably imperceptible, and she forces herself to give voice to her answer. “No.”

“Was it -- was it what Luna said?” Snow ventures instead, taking a half-step into the room. “Did you… reverse the idiom on your own?” Regina inhales sharply a little; she can’t say she’s all that surprised that Luna had clearly taken up company in Snow’s branches after their little spat yesterday. But if they’ve been _talking_ , then Snow knows _exactly_ what it is that Regina’s just done, and while Regina is ready to own that decision, she is absolutely not ready to talk about the reason _why_. Still, the sharp inhale on Regina’s part is clearly more than enough for Snow to read between the lines. She takes another step forward, and another, and Regina can barely keep her eyes trained on the hand Snow reaches out in her direction. “Regina, I --”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Regina pleads, breath hitching around a gasp. “Please, just -- I can’t talk about this, not right now. Can we just --” She stops for a moment to take an unsteady breath and forces herself to look up at Snow properly, her hand gripping the arm of her chair tight. Her step-sister’s hair is still that awful shade of blue, but the actual perpetual snowing spell seems to have finally worn off, at least. Snow looks positively _wild_ \-- leaves in her hair, dirt smudged around her ankles, a bright red rash all up and down her arms -- but it’s probably not any worse than Regina figures she looks right now, either. “There are towels and an extra robe, in the linen closet,” she says, nodding toward the landing outside of her bedroom. “You can use the spare bathroom down the hall to wash up. There’s a spare toothbrush in one of the drawers, and I think there might be something in the medicine cabinet that will help with the allergic reaction.”

Snow glances down at her arms and feet for a moment, clearly a little caught off guard and embarrassed, but there’s something almost… warm in her eyes when she looks back up, a gentle sort of understanding. “Okay,” she agrees quietly. “That’s -- thank you.” Regina nods absently, diverting her eyes once more and trying valiantly to breathe evenly and keep her tears at bay just a little longer. In her peripheral vision, she can see Snow turn and take the few steps back toward the bedroom door, but she stops and lingers at the threshold for half a moment before she turns back around. “After?” she ventures carefully. “After we’ve cleaned up, can I… come back? Will you talk to me then?”

Regina forces something that should be a smile but she knows isn’t, and when she looks back up, she deliberately trains her gaze at a spot beyond her step-sister, knowing she doesn’t have long before she’s unable to keep it together anymore. “You can’t come back if you don’t leave,” she argues, and it’s the only way she’ll allow herself to commit to this.

Opening herself up to Snow again is going to bring her nothing but pain, and Regina’s heart is a fool enough to make the same mistake twice.

It’s enough to pacify her sister, though, and once Snow is gone, Regina makes quick work of grabbing her own shower supplies before heading off to her personal bathroom. It’s only in the privacy of the bathroom that she finally deigns to look at her reflection in the mirror while she waits for the water to warm up. She was right -- she _does_ look just as wild as Snow, probably moreso. She plucks the leaves from her hair first and tosses them in the wastebasket, hoping she’s at least gotten most of the bigger pieces before she steps into the shower. She reaches for her toothbrush next -- her mouth feels _disgusting_ , honestly -- and brushes vigorously, renewing the toothpaste twice and taking an extra large swig of mouthwash; she’ll save the flossing for later.

The rest is a job for the actual bathing, so once the water is appropriately scalding, Regina disrobes and steps gingerly inside, knees feeling awkward and she climbs over the edge. It’s not nearly as bad as getting used to her bee or dog bodies was, but it’s still something she knows she’s going to feel the effects of; it’s been almost a week, after all. It seems she’s got dirt _everywhere_ , even in her hair, so she’s forced to wash and shampoo and condition and detangle everything at least twice. Her hands are the worst off, though, dirt caked in and around and under her nails, and she has to take a brush to them four or five times to make sure she’s gotten it all, the water swirling black and brown down the drain.

Once she’s finally done rubbing her skin red and raw, the water has turned tepid, at best, and she suddenly finds that she’s not at all ready to get out. She’s not sure she ever really will be, considering what’s waiting for her once she does, but this is one indulgence she thinks she’s long since earned at this point. So it’s with shaking, tender hands that Regina adjusts the showerhead to redirect the spray before she takes a few steps back and slowly sinks down to the floor, hardly aware of the way her sore muscles creak and groan in protest.

And knees tucked against her chest, Regina finally lets herself cry.

She is so _tired_ of hurting.

She loses track of how long she sits there curled in upon herself, now that she has nothing to mark the time. She keeps _losing_ things, each last memory and reminder slipping through her fingers, and for the first time, she allows herself the idea that this might have been what it was like for Daniel last month -- magic in his mind creating chasms and widening the gaps. And it’s not -- her retaining her memories of him in any way, shape, or form was part of the cost that had to be paid, but it was just as much a form of unspoken punishment too in much the same way walking that last extra mile was meant to be. The possibility that she could lose that -- that the pain of punishment could fade, with time -- is one she should embrace, relish even, but Regina finds, much to her surprise, that she very much can’t.

Her memories are all she has left of Daniel. Without them, it’s as if he never existed in her world.

Without them, it’s like they never loved at all, and Regina would not take pleasure absent of pain if it meant losing the mark he’d made on her.

He still _matters_.

(And beyond that, beneath it, buried down deeper than all the rest, Regina wonders if she ever will.)

She stays in the shower long past the point the water turns from tepid to freezing, stays even after she shuts the water off, shivering from the cold. She stays past the point her lips feel chapped and her tongue feels tacky in her mouth, stays through her fingers pruning and smoothing over time. She stays until she’s all cried out, until her breath stops coming short and sharp and shallow. It’s only when she starts to feel a dull throbbing behind her temple that she finally caves and gingerly gets to her feet and climbs out of the tub. She slips her bathrobe on, soft and not nearly warm enough, and pops a few ibuprofen to stave off the headache brewing behind her eyes.

The house is auspiciously quiet when she makes her way out into the hall back toward the landing. She can’t hear the sound of water running in the guest bathroom, but Snow isn’t in the bedroom when she returns, so Regina figures she’s still probably finishing up. For her part, she’s still towel-drying her hair when she crosses the threshold into her room, making sure it’s gone from dripping to damp before she leaves it be. Her gaze lands involuntarily on her desk again as she works, eyes finding the framed photograph again with ease, and absent her usual mark, Regina finds herself pulled toward it, needing a tether to him. She crosses the room, hangs the towel over the back of her chair and tightens the tie on her robe before she’s reaching for the frame again, careful as she picks it up and carries it with her to the bed, sinking down onto the mattress gingerly.

The photograph is the most recent one (the last one) she has of him, taken by his mother at graduation. There’s confetti in her hair, eyes closed and wrinkled around the edges to match her laughing smile, Daniel’s lips pressed against her cheek. She can see the places the edges of their caps had caught against one another, tassels tickling their ears, and she can see the place the flash of the camera had caught her bracelet, glinting against the light.

Now, Regina inhales sharply against the sting of tears at her eyes and runs her thumb over the glass. She has this, at least, to measure the mark -- a frame to capture the perfect still moment in time. They’d thought they had their whole future in front of them, back then.

Neither of them knew how precious little that would be, in the end.

“May I come in?”

Regina starts a little, blinking up at the doorway to find Snow lingering once again on the threshold. She’s still in her robe, too, but she looks clean and not nearly as irritated as before (though her hair is _still_ that really, really rather unfortunate shade of blue). At least she had the decency to ask permission, this time. Regina waves her in absently and drops her gaze back down to the picture in her lap, unsure if she’s found her voice just yet. The bed shifts and sinks under Snow’s added weight as she claims a spot opposite Regina, and though she doesn’t speak for a few moments, Snow’s voice is not quite so lost. “I found this,” she says eventually, holding out a hand in offering, “by my feet when I changed back. I think it fell into one of those holes you dug.”

Regina blinks up at her, brow knit in confusion for a moment, but the breath is startled from her lungs the second she catches sight of her missing bracelet gleaming against Snow’s fingers. Quickly, she sets the frame down to rest next to her and reaches for the bracelet, heart racing. “I thought I’d lost it,” she breathes, taking a moment to examine it and revel in the feel of it between her own fingers. There’s not a trace of dirt on it, which means Snow must have taken the time to clean it, and Regina finds herself admittedly a little… touched at the gesture. “Thank you,” she says quietly, glancing back up.

“You’re welcome,” Snow says, not unkindly, and the whole thing is honestly kind of… startlingly cordial, all things considered. “Do you want me to --” She gestures at the bracelet ambiguously for a second before Regina makes sense of the offer. Wordlessly, Regina holds both her wrist and the bracelet out, letting Snow fasten the clasp for her. Snow’s fingers linger over the bracelet, though, thumb dipping to the underside to trace over the engraving there. “What does 12:36 mean?”

Regina pulls her hand away to fiddle with the bracelet in kind, neither of them quite able to look one another in the eye. “It’s the time we first met, Daniel and I.”

It’s quiet for the beat of a breath before Snow is shifting a little on the bed and straightening her shoulders a bit. “You really loved him.”

The corner of Regina’s mouth twitches, the phantom of what will never be a smile. “I still do.”

“Of course,” Snow amends. “I just… I know how much losing him must have hurt. I know, I know, I couldn’t possibly understand,” she adds quickly, almost as if she could sense what Regina’s reaction would be. “I’m just a child, I’ve never been in love, I’m not _you_ \--”

“Look who’s sounding sensible for a change,” Regina murmurs dryly, a hint of teasing in her voice as she finally looks Snow in the eye.

Snow’s lips twist into a half-scowl with all the indignancy a ten year old can muster, but it’s gone almost as quickly as it appeared, replaced by something far more earnest and yearning in her eyes. “Please,” she requests, reaching out as if to take Regina’s hand, but she stops halfway through, seeming to think better of it. “Can you just… let me explain where I was coming from? Why I did what I did?”

Ache _burns_ against Regina’s sternum, her chest growing tight, and the tears that sting at her eyes again are worse than ever. “I can’t promise you it’ll be enough for me,” she whispers.

Snow purses her lips a little like she’s biting back an argument, fingers curling into a fist, but it’s not anger, Regina thinks, not quite. “At least you will have heard me,” Snow says instead, and there’s something else there, underneath any ire or insistence, something Regina can’t quite place.

It sinks in, then, that neither of them really _knows_ the other at all. And it’s Zelena she thinks of -- of skin tinged green and hair full of soot and a skirt changing colors -- before Regina swallows down her pride and nods her consent. “I’m listening.”

“I lost my mother when I was five,” Snow explains, and it should not land the way it does. Logically, Regina already knows this -- has known for quite a while that Snow’s mother died years before her father remarried. But Zelena’s voice echoes in the air -- _since you were five?_ \-- and suddenly Snow’s history has ten times the weight it did before. “When my father married your mother, she was… She’s fine, your mother,” Snow says, clearly struggling to choose the right words here. “I don’t think she dislikes me. But she’s not _my_ mother, Regina, in the same way my father isn’t yours. I’m never going to be as close to Cora as I was to my own mother.”

And Regina reads between the lines: _I know what it’s like to lose someone you love_.

“After your graduation, after -- after that dinner we had, it seemed like _all_ your mother could talk about was you. She said she regretted not being able to be there for you and talked about how much she wished the two of you were closer and how she hardly knew anything about your life here or what made you happy and I -- I just --” Snow stops, exhales sharply and scoots a little closer, and this time she doesn’t shy away when she reaches for Regina’s hand. Regina allows it, but only just barely, hand lax in Snow’s grasp as her stomach _churns_ at the thought of Cora masking manipulation as mothering. “I don’t _get_ to be close to my mother anymore, Regina. I just -- I kept thinking about what you said, how much you felt out of place, and your mother wanted to be close to you and I just -- I thought --”

“You wanted to help,” Regina surmises, accepting the argument at last. Snow nods a little in affirmation, the eagerness in her expression almost too much to bear. Regina looks back down at her bracelet for a moment, lip worried between her teeth as she tries to figure out where to even _begin_ to respond to that. She doesn’t see Snow’s expression, but she imagines it falters at the disconnect; the way Snow slowly tries to pull her hand away is proof enough of that. Regina tightens her fingers around Snow’s hands without though, keeping her in place, but it’s there, in the touch of a tether between them, that Regina thinks she finally finds her voice again. “I need _you_ to understand,” she says, doing her best to keep her voice level and even, “what it is that my mother was really trying to do.”

“I’m listening.”

Regina takes a breath to steady herself but doesn’t let go of Snow’s hand. She doesn’t look back up again, either; this will probably be easier, for the time being, if she doesn’t. “I told you the truth, at dinner,” she begins. “Zelena and I are… _trying_ to figure out how to be anything remotely close to sisters, but it’s not -- it hasn’t been easy. We haven’t had the chance to know each other -- _because_ of our mother -- and we didn’t exactly get off on the right foot.”

“But you _are_ trying,” Snow reminds her, ducking her head a little in what Regina _knows_ is an attempt to re-establish eye contact. “I could see that, even just at dinner.”

“I know,” Regina sighs, doing her best to stay patient. “But these things take time, and… as _much_ as I wish I could, I don’t really think I can count Zelena as someone who makes that feeling of being misplaced go away -- not yet, anyway. You were different. You were… open, willing. You _wanted_ to understand what it was like to have a foot in each realm. You wanted -- you wanted to know what it was that made my life here happy.” She tapers off, toward the end, stops and swallows and finally deigns to look back up. The slight shift of surprise on Snow’s face is enough to tell Regina that she has _failed_ at masking her own twinge of fear. “My mother -- _Cora_ saw that.”

Snow wrinkles her nose, eyes clouding with clear confusion. “Okay, but I don’t… understand,” she admits slowly, clearly trying to read between the lines herself. “You… make it sound like she didn’t really want to help you at all.”

A humorless laugh escapes Regina’s throat, lips twisting into a smile wry and without warmth. “I wouldn’t really call what she does _helping_.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not about me,” Regina explains, not unkindly. “It’s never about me. It’s never about anyone other than her. You telling her about Daniel wasn’t so she could suddenly be invested in my future happiness. It was so she could keep me from making what she considers to be a mistake in being matched to a mortal.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Snow argues, and her laugh isn’t quite as dry or humorless as Regina’s had been, but there’s an edge of uncertainty around it. “You’re _half_ , why would it bother her that you -- oh.” Clarity dawns in Snow’s eyes _much_ faster than Regina had been anticipating -- she’s surprisingly sharp, for ten -- but it’s overshadowed just as quickly with what Regina thinks is incredulity, something hard around the edges.

And in the space of a _second_ , Regina thinks she sees innocence lost.

“It was her choice to leave, wasn’t it?” Snow murmurs, and there is something almost dangerous in her voice, low and vibrating underneath. “It’s not -- it was never that she didn’t have a choice, it’s that she chose _herself_.”

A proper smile finally makes its way onto Regina’s face, but it’s broken, tinged with the sadness that comes with Snow _finally_ understanding, and the words that leave her lips are not her own. “I think she always has,” she offers. “I’m not sure she knows any other way.”

“Then what’s the _point_?” Snow asks, sharp and snapping as she snatches her hand away and _oh_ , she’s _angry_ , nearly as close to tears as Regina is, too. “If all she cares about is herself, then why does she _care_ what you do? Why doesn’t she just leave you alone?”

“Because I’m part of this world now, whether she likes it or not,” Regina says, gesturing absently around the room. “And if she has to accept me as part of it, then she’s going to make sure she puts me in my place. And I… will never really have the chance to try and pull myself away. She’s positioned herself too well. And the thing that just… _really_ gets under my skin about it,” she grits out, biting back the pain that swells in her chest, “is that the _only_ times it ever really _matters_ to her is either when it might make her look bad or when she might somehow benefit from having me around.”

It’s Snow who breaks the eye contact this time around, and the shadow that flits across her face makes her look far older than she really is -- more weary, Regina thinks, than anyone her age should be. “Well,” she mutters darkly, “I can at least say I know what that feels like.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t go away for school until after my father remarried,” Snow points out, and Regina is not the only one, it seems, whom Cora wants to put in a particular place. Her cold distance from Zelena, Regina thinks, more than makes that case.

Each of them, in turn, has been pulled into a game they don’t want to play.

Across the divide, Regina takes back Snow’s hand. “Look,” she says, voice a little thicker now that she can feel the tears properly welling in her eyes again, “I know that you loved your mother. I know that mine will never replace her. You’ll never be as close to my mother as you were to yours, and that’s _okay_ ,” she insists, squeezing Snow’s hand gently to get her to meet her eyes again. “But… I will never be close to mine, and I don’t want to be. I _can’t_ be,” she says, imploring Snow to understand. “I don’t want to be close to someone when all they do is hurt me over and over again, and with her? _I don’t have a choice_.”

And it’s all there, the sheer weight of understanding in Snow’s eyes, but she is the one, in the end, to bridge the gap across the chasm in Regina’s mind. “And with Daniel, you did,” she guesses. “And now you don’t. Because of what she did to him.”

Regina’s chin trembles with the effort not to give into the urge to cry, tears _brimming_ on her lashes now, and she squeezes Snow’s hand one last time before she pulls away one last time. “I don’t have anyone left.”

“That’s not true,” Snow insists, over-eager and breathless as she leans forward. Regina barks out a wet laugh, blinking twice until the tears spill, fall and trickle down, and she doesn’t even bother trying to disguise her placating smile when Snow takes up her hand again and scoots in close. “No, _listen_ , okay? I know you’ll probably just say it’s some sort of complicated grown-up thing, and -- okay, I know you said you were still trying to work things out with Zelena. But you _do_ have her, Regina,” Snow reminds her, still somehow managing to sound kind. “And… for what it’s worth, you have me, too.”

Regina’s lips twist into a crooked smile as another tear escapes -- one, two, three more. “That’s not without its own complications, either,” she points out. “It’s not like we can really see each other without my mother being involved in some way.”

“We’ll figure something out,” Snow argues, waving a hand dismissively. “I’m at school most of the year anyway, remember?”

Regina arches an eyebrow and throws her a look. “I don’t think even you’re that naive enough anymore to think that’ll make a difference, with her. She’s got her fingers in just about everything in the Other Realm, Snow. You know that as well as I do.”

Snow’s lips twist into a half-scowl that’s really not all that becoming for someone who’s kind of gone from ten to fifteen in the last half hour. “Okay, well, is it okay if… _I_ come to visit _you_? Or -- oh! I could bring Zelena with me!” she suggests, eyes lighting up a little. “That way your mother wouldn’t feel like she had to accompany me, and you could see us both!”

It’s not… a terrible idea, in the grand scheme of things -- certainly preferable to Regina going to the Other Realm and risking running into Cora -- but it’s not exactly foolproof, either. There’s nothing stopping Cora from coming to visit whenever she feels like it, protocol and politeness be damned, but it would at least draw enough of a line in the sand. Snow doesn’t have an out, either -- Leo did _marry_ Cora, after all -- and Zelena is, in her own twisted way, trying to maintain a connection of her own volition. And Regina -- Regina doesn’t want to begrudge either of her sisters a relationship with Cora, but she’ll be damned if she’s going to let Cora continue to dictate the relationships her sisters have with _her_.

This -- _they_ are not another thing Regina has to lose, not if she’s willing to work around the line in the sand. And after losing Daddy -- and Morgana, and Daniel -- Regina thinks that maybe the good still outweighs the bad. Maybe putting up with Cora -- with _Mother_ is still something she can stand against -- especially now that she doesn’t really have to do it alone.

Maybe her sisters are worth this particular cost, in the end.

“We’ll see,” Regina muses, not unkindly. “I’ll have to talk to Zelena, see what she thinks. In the meantime,” she sighs, sitting up a little straighter in an admittedly desperate effort to finally change the subject, “I think we’ve reached the point where we should really get you ready to go home -- or, back to school, I guess. I’m not sure what’s going on with your summer classes at this point.”

Snow makes a rather undignified noise and looks down and away for a moment, but she doesn’t pull away, fingers finding the spaces between Regina’s own. “Well, I haven’t done any homework in like a week, so I’ll probably have to make all of that up, and I’m sure they’ll probably give me detention or something right before I go home for the month since I stormed off without notice.”

Regina bites back a somewhat sheepish smile and reaches out with her free hand to tug gently at Snow’s hair. “I suppose I should fix this for you, then. Since it’s against your dress code and everything. I don’t -- I never learned how to reverse the spell, but we can run down to the drugstore, pick up a box of dye. No one will know the difference.”

Snow half-glances back up at her, but the smile she offers up is hollow, lacking warmth. “Can we get something to eat, too?” Regina’s smile falters at that, guilt twisting in her gut, and it shows, she _knows_ it shows, because Snow’s expressions shifts in response as she rushes to explain. “Oh no, it’s not -- I wasn’t actually hungry when I was… a tree, don’t worry. But I’m _definitely_ hungry now, so --”

“Sure,” Regina agrees amicably, relaxing a little. “We can pick up a take ‘n bake pizza and throw it in the oven while we work on your hair.”

“Thank you,” Snow murmurs, and this time when she pulls her hand away, the smile she offers is full, kind.

The next few minutes are like navigating new waters. Civil and cordial are far too basal for them now, but they’re not exactly… friends, not yet, not entirely. In much the same way that Regina feels like she’s trying to find her footing with Zelena, she can sense she’s walking into the same sort of situation with Snow. The wall is down, to be sure, and they’ve taken a few steps forward, but Regina is not quite so naive anymore, either. She won’t make the same mistake she made at dinner, last month, not until she can be sure that Snow is able to do the same in kind.

And without a safe place to land, Regina is far less willing to leave her heart behind.

Still, putting in the extra effort to be… social for Snow’s sake at least provides Regina with enough distraction from the pain to keep her focused on the task at hand. Each of them tests their magic out with small spells to ensure everything is working properly, and without even going downstairs, Regina uses her own to make sure the mess in the kitchen and the yard is gone. Snow uses hers to clean her uniform, but it’s an impractical and unnecessary thing to wear tonight given the trip to town, the impending dye job, and the night’s sleep they have in front of them. So Regina digs out an old copy of an Other Realm catalog and lets Snow pick out exactly two outfits while she gets dressed and they make idle chatter about what the mortal realm is really like.

“Honestly, you’ll probably find it pretty dull by comparison,” Regina says, tugging her top on, “but there’s a museum not too far from here that has some pretty cool history about our people, and --”

“Regina?”

“Hmm?”

She feels Snow’s hand at her elbow and turns intuitively, not giving the touch a second thought, but she lets out a slight _oomphs_ when Snow wraps her arms around Regina’s waist tight, cheek pressed against Regina’s chest. “For what it’s worth,” Snow mumbles, “I _am_ sorry.”

Regina lets her arms hover in the air for half a moment before she slowly brings them down to wrap around Snow in kind, hand anchored against the back of Snow’s head. “I know,” she sighs, swallowing the last of her ire down. “I know.”

* * * * *

Snow stays late into the evening on day seven, but eventually, she does go home (or, school, for a short time, before she actually gets somewhat of a vacation this summer). Regina sees her to the linen closet and agrees to Snow’s incessant pleading that she’ll keep in touch by Toaster Mail or crystal ball (or both) with a, “Yes, yes, fine, will you get going already before they try to give me detention for keeping you for so long?”

So Snow leaves with her new clothes stuffed into a drawstring bag from the Salem Witch Museum gift shop and a parting, still far too-tight to be comfortable hug for Regina, and neither of them says a word when they each hold on a little too long. And after the usual boom-clap of the linen closet to signify that someone’s gone through the portal, Regina lingers on the upper landing staring at a closed door.

For a very long moment, she is once again alone.

She takes a minute to breathe through it, thumb fiddling idly with her bracelet, but when she starts to turn around, she’s surprised to see Luna for the first time in days. She’s exactly where Regina found her at the start of the week, curled up atop the hamper, but even though her eyes are closed, Regina doesn’t think she’s actually sleeping. Luna definitely wasn’t there a few minutes ago while Regina was saying goodbye to Snow, which means she’s deliberately positioned herself here in the aftermath of the war, waiting for Regina to break the ice.

And Regina is reminded, once again, that she does not have to be alone.

Swallowing her pride is surprisingly easy this time around, though she thinks that’s more because she _knows_ she owes this to Luna. Gingerly, she kneels down in front of the hamper, wincing a little at the way her joints and muscles ache in protest and wondering idly when she’ll feel comfortable in her own body again. She takes half a breath and begins to reach out a hand but stops halfway, thinking better of it. “Luna.” The cat does not so much as twitch an ear or open an eye to acknowledge her, but there’s a slight shift in her breathing, Regina can tell by the rise and fall of her body. Regina lets out a soft sigh and rests her palms on top of her thighs, but she knows better than to push too far. “Luna, I’m _sorry_. You were right, okay? I have been… angry, and hurting, and aimless, and none of that excuses the shit I put Snow through. And it definitely doesn’t excuse taking it all out on you the other day. You were right -- I _was_ being a bitch.”

Still nothing, but then -- a wiggle of Luna’s nose, almost imperceptible to the point where Regina’s not sure if it was involuntary or not. She hesitates, debating whether or not to press forward, and then Luna flicks her tail -- makes it look like she’s adjusting, tucking it against herself, but she’s too transparent to make it convincing.

Regina softens into a smile.

Tentatively, she reaches out a hand again, gently stroking her fingers against Luna’s fur. She passes over once, twice, waits for some indication that it’s not okay -- a growl or a hiss or a shifting away -- but Luna still doesn’t really move, and Regina takes it for the silent permission it is. “I know you’re stuck with someone while you live out the rest of your sentence,” she says. “I know they placed you with us. I know you can request to be reassigned, if you really want to be. You were -- you were right. You don’t have to be stuck with me, and you definitely don’t have to try filling Aunt Morgana’s shoes.

“But the thing is, Luna,” she murmurs, dropping her voice and shifting a little closer, “you got me out of nearly as many tight spots as Morgana did in the last couple of years. You were the one who tried to help me solve problems on my own before admitting defeat. _You_ were the one who sat with me in the kitchen after I had to leave Daniel, and you didn’t so much as bat an eye when I asked you for help after I got myself into this -- this mess this past week. You never have, from the moment I moved in and Aunt Morgana was put in charge of my magic lessons. You _took care of me_ ,” she whispers, leaning in and chancing a kiss to the top of Luna’s head. “And you may not need me, specifically, Luna, but I think I need _you_.”

Gently, Regina withdraws her hand and pulls away, surveying Luna carefully. But Luna still won’t budge, doesn’t even offer up a the slightest of purrs, and Regina just barely suppresses a sigh of disappointment. She’s not sure if Luna’s upset enough to actually request a reassignment, but she’s clearly sticking to the silent treatment for the time being. Regina figures she deserves that, honestly, but she’s hoping that if Luna decides to stay, that this wall will come down too, with time.

The house is… quiet in the wake of Snow’s departure, but it’s not as unnerving as it has been in recent weeks. In a strange way, it’s almost sort of… calming, allowing the constant chatter in her brain to fade into background noise for the rest of the night. She feels unfocused as she gets ready for bed, but not in a bad way, mind a little fuzzy and an idle hum in the back of her throat. Her nighttime routine is a little longer tonight, like the night before: she still doesn’t quite feel like she’s gotten all the way out of her canine body just yet, skin feeling a little prickly and gross. So she takes a little extra care, brushes her teeth twice and gives herself a face mask before she washes up properly, and when she brushes out the wrinkles in her hair, she’s pleased to find that the last broken bits of leaves are finally absent.

In her room, she changes into her favorite nightgown (lavender, with a print of crystal balls and cauldrons and sparkling swirls) and sets a glass of water on her nightstand. She pauses halfway through turning down the sheets and blankets, eyes landing one last time on the framed photograph of her and Daniel on her desk. She bites her lip, debating for a moment, before crossing to the far side of the room and pick it up, moving it to rest on her nightstand, instead. Feeling a bit more settled, she climbs up into bed, switches the light off, and tries to get comfortable in the dark.

As always, she leaves her bracelet on.

She’s just shy of drifting off into what is promising to be an actual restful sleep when she feels the slightest shift on the mattress. Blearily, she blinks open her eyes and finds a pair of yellow ones staring back at her. She opens her mouth to greet Luna by name and ends up yawning instead, but that, apparently, is all the indication of Regina’s consciousness that Luna needs. “Catnip,” she says, very matter-of-factly, “and an entire extra can of Fancy Feast for the next _two_ weeks. And then we can call it even.”

And even in her leadened lethargy, Regina finds it in her to smile sleepily in Luna’s direction. “Deal.”

“Now,” Luna sighs, walking daintily up the mattress, “scoot over and let me under the covers. I can actually sleep with you now that you won’t slobber all over me.” Regina lets out the barest of chuckles but obliges, shifting and lifting the covers for Luna to duck under them. She takes her sweet time in trying to find a comfortable position, but eventually she settles, sprawling alongside Regina’s abdomen, and it takes her approximately four seconds to start purring.

They’re both content in the quiet after that, ready to let sleep pull them under, but just before Regina drops off, Luna catches her ear once more. “For what it’s worth,” Luna mumbles, half-awake, “you take care of me, too.”

* * * * *

July burns off and simmers into August, and Regina… tries to find ways to cope.

She retreats back into gardening, now that she has opposable thumbs again and there isn’t a giant apple tree obscuring her flowerbeds. She triple checks that she’s as prepared as she can be for her first semester at Adams next month sans a booklist or two she’s still waiting on. She reads a _lot_ and practices her potion making under Luna’s watchful eye. And, as per her promise to Snow, she sends a few letters back and forth to both of her sisters via Toaster Mail and talks to Zelena about playing chaperone to their step-sister.

(It’s not until after Snow’s home for her month-long vacation before she goes away to school again that Regina hears from Cora at all, and the subsequent Toaster Mail she receives -- _I’m glad to hear you’re finally getting over this whole nonsense where that mortal boy was concerned_ \-- is nearly enough to make her set the entire kitchen on fire.)

But it’s only a week into Snow’s stay-cation before Regina’s receiving more Toaster Mail from her step-sister, this one several pages long. The only part of it she can make out, though, is Snow’s tidy script right at the beginning that says _call me when you figure it out_ , and Regina is left to furrow her brow and glance over the pages of nonsensical gibberish her sister has sent her. It’s not until Luna hops up onto the kitchen table and glance over her arm that she realizes what it is she’s looking at. “Oh for the love of Merlin,” Luna says, sighing long-sufferingly. “Did your charming little sister internalize the trip to the museum so much that she’s channeling the seventeenth century covens in her letters now?”

It takes Regina longer than she’s proud of to remember what they’d even learned from the tour guide that day. “You think… she’s using a cipher?”

“Clearly,” Luna draws, tapping her paw against the page on top. “Look -- that v is obviously an a, and that whole word probably means ‘the’ --”

“Okay, hang on,” Regina interrupts. “Why would she bother using a cipher now? She hasn’t in any of her other letters.”

“Why does anyone use a cipher?” Luna muses. “To keep information from falling into the wrong hands.”

And all at once, Regina understands: this is about her mother.

“Thanks,” she says absently, redirecting her attention to the page in front of her. “That’s -- I’m going to take this upstairs and see if I can’t riddle it out.”

“Fine by me,” Luna says with a yawn, stretching lazily across the table. “The new neighbors who moved in across the street have an annoying little yapper of a dog. I think I’ll go perch myself in the window for a nap.” Regina rolls her eyes at the all-too-obvious display of territorialism, but the corner of her mouth twitches up in a smile all the same, and she scratches Luna behind the ear before they each go their separate ways.

Upstairs, Regina sets to work, sprawling the pages out across the bed and unearthing a fresh notebook to start deciphering the code. It invokes a sense of nostalgia in her for the first few minutes she works; she hasn’t done something like this since she was ten, when she’d saved up her allowance and sent for a set herself. Daddy had indulged her, once she’d outgrown the easier puzzles and riddles, and thus had begun their Saturday morning rituals of challenging each other with various brain teasers. And in a strange way, it’s the memory of that which makes her a little grateful that Snow had decided to send her this now. This year has been… a _lot_ , and it’s barely half over, but with the gain of two sisters and the loss of Daniel (the absence of Aunt Morgana), Regina is reminded that she has only lost some things in pieces. It’s been well over two years since Daddy’s death (it’ll be three, this November), but each passing year has given her the chance to communicate with him every Halloween via the Other Realm’s designated channels. And this year, she thinks she needs that more than she ever has before.

This year, she needs all the reminders she can get that she is not alone.

It doesn’t take her all that long to sort out the cipher itself -- it’s a fairly simple one, all things considered -- but it takes her nearly an hour to use it to translate the pages upon pages Snow has sent her. When she finally manages to finish, she works her way back to the beginning, and she tries not to feel too irritated when the first thing she reads is _turn to page eighty-eight in your spellbook_. Grumbling, she hoists the large book onto her bed and flips to the page in question, wondering idly if Snow put in the extra effort to make this seem like homework just as her own little form of petty revenge. But as she drags her finger over the page and reads, she finds that her irritation fades, her heart picking up pace with time.

It’s… a barrier spell.

More than curious, Regina turns her attention back to the deciphered letter, and it’s there she’s finally able to make sense out of what she couldn’t before. A good portion of what Snow’s written simply rehashes the finer points of what it is the spell actually does, but there’s more there, too. _Don’t just cast it on the linen closet_ , Snow had written. _Do it over the whole property. I tried to think of as many loopholes as I could; you’ll have to insert them into spell if you want to close them._ At that, Regina thumbs her way through the rest of the pages, and she’s unable to help the way her jaw goes a little slack at the time and thought and care Snow put into researching all of this.

The last page, though, has her heartbeat slowing, her eyes fixated on the page.

_It’s not a perfect solution. Your mother is still more powerful than you and I combined. She still holds a seat on the Council. But I think maybe that’ll work more in your favor than in hers, this time. If she wants to keep her position, she can’t really abuse her power the way she would need to in order to get around the barrier spell. It would make her look bad, if she did, especially given her history._

_...I may have done a little digging into her records._

_Call me, before you do it. There’s one last thing you need._

Her breath feels short, stilted and shallow in her lungs as she sets the page down with the others. It makes sense, now, why Snow would use a cipher for this. On the off-chance that Cora would have intercepted it and read it, it would have at least taken her time to riddle the whole thing out before she could have done anything about it. Snow would have had time to warn her, and Regina still would have had a fighting chance to enact it. As it stands, Regina doesn’t think her mother knows a damn thing about this, and the prospect of being able to go through with this -- to make the line in the sand into a brick wall between realms -- has tears of relief stinging at her eyes.

(There is a part of her, however small, that thinks this might be too good to be true.)

With shaking hands, Regina shifts on her bed and turns toward the crystal ball set up on her nightstand. It takes her a minute to fumble through her drawer and unearth the slip of paper Snow had left her with giving her instructions on how to reach her private line. She squashes down every part of her that had questioned why a ten year old needed her own crystal line because she is sure as hell not going to look a gift horse in the mouth now -- not when it could be the most convenient thing she’s come across all year. She takes her time in trying to send out the signal, her skills a little rusty due to lack of use in this particular department, but eventually she makes the connection.

She only has to wait for the space of three… rings, if that’s what they can be called, before Snow accepts the connection on her end, her face coming into slightly distorted view in the crystal ball. “Well, that was fast,” Snow greets with a laugh, “though I guess I’m not really all that surprised. I didn’t think it would take you that long.”

“I’ve had some practice,” Regina admits, shifting a little closer to make sure her face is in proper view. “But this is… Snow, are you sure this is even going to work? A barrier spell seems a little too… convenient.”

Snow’s face disappears from view for a second, almost like she’s looking over her shoulder, but there’s no trace of worry in her expression when she turns her attention back to Regina. “Sorry, I just want to make sure she wasn’t home,” she explains. “But I’m positive. They’re used all the time here. It’s sort of like -- what was that man called again? The one outside of the store we went to?”

Regina bites back a laugh. “A security guard?”

“Yes, like that,” Snow agrees. “It protects you where you live. Although, honestly, I’ve been thinking about it, and I think that’s part of the reason family feuds go on for so long over here. I mean, no _wonder_ people hold grudges --”

“Snow,” Regina interjects. “Focus.”

“Right, sorry. The _point_ ,” Snow says, leaning in a little closer to her ball, “is that it works, and if you close most of the loopholes -- making sure she can’t come as someone’s guest, things like that -- then the only way she can get to you is by breaking laws in either realm. And like I said in the letter --”

“-- she wants to hold onto her power too much to risk it,” Regina supplies. She’s quiet for a half moment while she tries to absorb that, briefly glancing over her shoulder at the letter again before she turns her attention back to her sister. “You said I needed one more thing.”

“Timing,” Snow says simply. “If you do it when she’s busy, she won’t be keeping tabs on you. It’ll be harder for her to try and stop you from enacting it in the first place.”

A smile breaks onto Regina’s face, but it’s dampened around the edges, chin trembling as tears brim on her lashes. “You say that like you already have something in mind,” she teases, voice shaky and uneven.

Snow bites back her own smile, clearly trying not to full-on grin. “Friday?” she ventures. “High noon. I know she’ll be somewhere else, then.”

Regina swallows thickly, _overwhelmed_ with gratitude, but she holds back her tears a little longer; she won’t cry, not yet. “I’ll, um -- I’ll make sure I’m ready by then.” A beat, and then, “And… Snow? Thank you. Really, I -- I don’t --” She cuts herself off, not entirely sure where to even _begin_ in terms of expressing how grateful she is for this, but across the line, she finds she doesn’t have to.

Snow does it for her.

“Well,” Snow muses, her answering smile gentle and warm, “what are sisters for, after all?”

* * * * *

On Friday, Regina enacts the barrier spell -- complete with closed loopholes -- at high noon, and she falls asleep that night knowing that there is very little chance she will see her mother ever again.

Just under twenty-four hours later, there is a knock on the front door downstairs, and Regina is not at all prepared for who is on the other side.

“Zelena,” she greets, knowing her surprise must be transparent on her face. “I -- I don’t -- what are you doing here?”

“Can’t a girl come visit her sister unannounced?” Zelena counters airily, leaning against the doorjamb. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

Regina opens her mouth and closes it without uttering a word, sidestepping just enough to let Zelena breeze past her, a large carpet bag in each hand. Regina’s nose wrinkles at that, but she puts a pin in it for now, trying to focus on one thing at a time to reign Zelena’s whirlwind of a tornado in. “Why didn’t you just use the linen closet upstairs?” she asks, closing and locking the door behind her.

“Ah, yes, _that_ , well,” Zelena sighs, setting her bags down at the foot of the stairs. She whirls on the spot effortlessly, hands settled on her hips, and it’s only then that Regina really takes note of her appearance. She doesn’t entirely stick out like a sore thumb in this realm, but she’s definitely done up -- cinched waist, fancy boots, a (frankly ridiculous looking) hat perched on her head and a honest-to-Merlin cape draped around her shoulders. The whole ensemble strikes Regina as a bit odd -- not for her sister, but for the realm, given the way she arrived. “I’ve been a little busy as of late, so our darling little sister called to have a little chat recently. She got me all caught up on everything that’s happened with your, um…” Here, Zelena falters, cheeks tinging the faintest of pinks, and Regina can tell that she’s caught herself before she’s said something dismissive.

“Daniel,” Regina supplies softly, offering her an encouraging smile.

“Yes, your Daniel fellow,” Zelena concedes, looking a little uncomfortable as she shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “Anyway, we got to talking a bit and while I’m not exactly ready to thrown the towel in with Mother yet, our little Snowflake may have made a rather… convincing argument as to why you’ve every right to do so.”

“O...kay,” Regina says slowly, eyes narrowed in confusion. “What does that have to do with you showing up at my front door?”

Again, Zelena shifts her weight like she’s uncomfortable -- almost like she wants to crawl out of her skin right now -- but Regina can’t quite put her finger on what it is that’s bothering her. “Well,” Zelena muses, voice pitching in a way that Regina _knows_ means Zelena’s gearing up for a fun bit of storytelling, “after our little chat, I may have gone to the Other Realm archives to do a little research on references to witches in the mortal realm.”

Regina blinks at that, caught off guard. “ _Why_?”

“To play the part, dear,” Zelena chuckles, reaching out to rest her hand atop the banister. “And let me tell you, mortals have some very interesting ideas of what our kind are like -- there was a whole file in there about a witch who built an entire house out of _sweets_ for the express purpose of --”

“Get to the point, Zelena.”

“Spoilsport,” Zelena mutters dramatically, but her expression shifts, something akin to discomfort flitting across her face, and they’re closer to the heart of the matter, it seems, than Regina had originally thought. “The _point_ , then,” Zelena sighs, very much long-sufferingly, “is that I may have then decided to take a little trip to a… _quaint_ little place in this realm called Kansas to wreak a little havoc of my own. You know, dog-nappings, tornadoes, firestorms, fields of poppies, the whole nine, really --”

“Hang on,” Regina interjects, holding up a hand. “Are you telling me you went to Kansas and basically became _the Wicked Witch of the West_? Even though your little skin condition has long since cleared up?”

“Oh, good!” Zelena says brightly, clapping her hands together. “You’ve seen the documentary then.”

“That’s -- it’s not -- nevermind,” Regina sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose for a second to try and curb the headache brewing behind her eyes. “I still don’t understand what the point of all of that was.”

At that, Zelena finally lets most of her bravado slip, and Regina thinks she sees a tinge of warmth in her sister’s irises. “Friday,” Zelena says simply, voice a lot quieter as her hands find anchor on her hips again. “High noon. Where do you _think_ Mother’s attention was yesterday: on you, or on the daughter who decided to play at being rebellious for a day somewhere much farther away?”

Breath caught in her chest, Regina slowly gives a half-glance over her shoulder at the front door before turning her eyes upstairs, her gaze settling, finally on the set of bags on either side of the main staircase. “Tell me you didn’t get yourself banned from the Other Realm,” Regina breathes, locking eyes with Zelena again. “Tell me you did not _risk your license_ for this.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Zelena dismisses, waving a hand like the mere thought is an irksome fly. “The entire Council is a bit weary of anything even remotely resembling taking away my rights, given our little injunction earlier this year. And Mother was all in a tizzy yesterday trying to clean up the little mess I created, so while I did have to be punished for it, it wasn’t in her best interests to let them be too harsh. Just a bit of probation is all -- hence the reason why I didn’t come the normal way. At the moment, I’m not strictly allowed, but it’s not long, just two weeks, and I was hoping you might have a bit of space for me to -- _oomph_.”

Regina resolutely does not care if her sister finds it a little hard to breathe at the moment, just wraps her arms around Zelena and curls her hands up to grip Zelena’s shoulder tight, face tucked against Zelena’s neck. Regina tries to breathe, but it comes out a deep, shuddering thing, thick and wet and only barely keeping the tears at bay. Zelena’s movements are a touch awkward and stiff as she brings up her hands to clumsily pat Regina’s back. “Oh, alright then,” she mumbles, clearly embarrassed by the whole thing. “No need to get all weepy about it, Dorothy.”

Regina barks out a laugh against Zelena’s skin, she cannot help it, and even if she’s crying properly when she pulls away, she figures the fact that she’s smiling is more than enough to quell any of Zelena’s concerns. “Of course you can stay,” she agrees, warm and wet and wild. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”


	4. Chapter 4

**And one time it wasn’t so bad: eleven years later.**

When Robin walks in the front door on Tuesday afternoon, it’s to the smell of something baking in the kitchen. His first instinct is to close his eyes and inhale deeply, but the smile that begins to spread across his face falters almost as soon as it had blossomed, and when the front door clicks shut behind him his eyes are back open, lips pursing a bit in apprehension. She’s a _glorious_ baker, his Regina, fills the house with tantalizing smells and tempts his sweet tooth far too many times to count. But his wife is also very much a stress baker, and he can never be quite certain, on days like these, if he’s to be met with a smile and a kiss and a piece of pie or an abundance of bread loaves and a sink full of dishes.

Presently, there could be any number of things getting under her skin, he thinks as he tugs off his satchel and scarf. There’s always the usual sources of her ire and anxiety — magic and mother alike — but there’s more to take into consideration at the moment. He’s a bit better off than she is at the moment: he’s still got time to pull together the last of what he needs for the semester, has only just been roped into staff meetings on campus today. Classes at the university don’t start for another couple of weeks, not until after Labor Day, but Regina isn’t afforded the same luxury at the lower school; she never has been. Her school year always starts in the middle of August, which means July is hardly over before she’s pressed to set up her classroom and make lesson plans and tolerate meetings with administrators and board members alike.

This year, things have been a bit more rough on her. Her younger sister had sprung the news on them last month that she’s been considering taking a sabbatical in the mortal realm for a year. And Regina, naturally, immediately went into considering every possible outcome and consequence, even if she’d never let on to her sister. It’s overkill, Robin knows — Snow had only mentioned it in passing, and it’d seemed to Robin like she was still tossing ideas around, hadn’t really committed to much of anything. But his wife likes to be Prepared, likes to stay ahead of the game and know what expectations are had of her and decidedly does _not_ like surprises, so he’d entirely anticipated her long, anxiety-fueled tirades every few days when a new thought occurred to her.

Part of it is discomfort — she’s very suspect that her sister will somehow coerce her way into staying with them. And while Regina _loves_ her sisters fiercely, she’s also very much not in a place to entertain a long-term house guest at the start of a school year with Halloween right around the corner — not to mention Mal’s usual post hibernation stay through December, or his parents flying over the pond for Christmas this year. But there’s another part of it, Robin knows, quiet and hidden behind all of the bluster, that comes from a place of caring and concern. Snow isn’t all that familiar with the mortal realm, and considering the alternative — that she _wouldn’t_ end up staying with them during her sabbatical — makes Regina equally uneasy. She worries, bless her, even when she feels like she’s being put out, and somewhere beneath the person she’s become is still the person he thinks she probably was at eighteen: tentative and nervous and aching, straddling the lines between sister and mother and friend.

On top of all of that, though, Regina’s felt off kilter the last couple of weeks, overly-tired and sore and off-balance. Frankly, it’s made her fuse a bit shorter than usual, her temper flaring up faster even at the best of times. She’s stressed, and tired, and the school year’s only just begun, so all things considered, Robin thinks it’s far more likely that the Regina he’s about to meet in the kitchen is up to her elbows in dough with a semi-permanent crease between her eyebrows.

He takes a deep, measured breath to steel himself as he moves toward the door to the kitchen, already mentally planning out small gestures for the evening to pick up her mood a bit (indulging in a glass of red instead of white; drawing her a bath; unearthing the _Bewitched_ boxset from their collection). “Darling,” he calls tentatively, pushing open the swinging door between the living room and the kitchen, “are you —”

And then he halts, dead in his tracks just at the threshold to the kitchen, and takes in the scene in front of him.

Oh, she’s clearly been baking, or seems to have been, from the looks of things, but Robin was not quite prepared for this level of… chaos. The kitchen is, quite literally, _flooded_ with various baked goods. He can’t even quite discern what all of them are, but there are dozens upon dozens of them, piled high and spilled over the countertops, pressed against the windows of the french doors to the backyard. The smell is even stronger in here, infinitely more tempting, but Robin can hardly give any lingering hunger he might have had a second thought. He can barely see a place to _move_ , much less walk, and he cannot even imagine what a nightmare this could be to clean up.

(For one wild moment, he thinks of the picture Belle had texted him the morning of his and Regina’s wedding, of the mountain of pennies cascading out of their bedroom closet. He remembers the brief flicker of alarm, the careful inquiry and the subsequent reminder of idiom interpretations — of a nose misplaced and a dragon hoarding.)

And then his eyes search, drift and settle low and to the left to where his wife is curled up on the floor against the lower cabinets, surrounded by piles of the damned things, flour streaked across her face and knees tucked against her chest, and in that moment nothing else matters.

Slowly, he tries to make as short of a path as possible on the floor, kicking aside one round loaf and then another as he goes, narrowly avoiding making contact with a sticky cinnamon bun. It takes him far longer than he wants or thinks it really should, piles tumbling down behind him to cover the tile he’s just uncovered and crossed, but eventually he manages to get to the spot Regina’s claimed on the kitchen floor. He pauses for a moment, glances around as he tries to figure out the best way to create space for himself without being assaulted by pastries, but before he can even begin to formulate a plan, she speaks up from her place on the floor, her voice quiet and thin. “I hate magic.”

All of the air leaves him at once, shoulders sagging in sympathy as he crouches down and tries to worm his way onto a small patch of floor next to her, fending off falling food as he settles in. He’s not entirely surprised by the declaration — she often bemoans the ways in which magic has made her life more difficult and complicated — but rarely does her ire ever reach this level of loathing. She’s embraced it openly and easily since he’d learned the truth, has never had any qualms about sharing history or giving practical demonstrations or showing her enthusiasm for Halloween. The morning of their wedding notwithstanding (and maybe, perhaps, that two week stint last year when a lint gremlin had emerged from the laundry and run amok, pickpocketing various possessions until he was finally caught), there’s usually very little reason for her to get this upset.

Which means that something beyond the mere fact that their kitchen has exploded into a bakery is bothering her — something far more trying than the usual mishaps and mayhem.

So he’s a bit tentative when he ventures to wrap his arm around her shoulders, unsure just what her temperament is like at the moment, but she leans into him with ease, cheek cushioned against his chest and arm hooking around the small of his back. He can’t quite get a good look at her face in this position, but he takes his cues elsewhere, notes the way she hasn’t changed out of her work clothes save for toeing off her shoes. He watches the way her toes flex and curl, feels the careful, measured breaths she’s taking against his body, and he can tell there’s some variety of an outburst simmering just beneath her skin, tension pulled taut like a string.

But she doesn’t need too much prompting, it seems, because she’s barely curled against him for more than a moment before she’s speaking again, her voice tinged with that same low, thin incredulity. “Mortals think magic is this amazing thing — a power to wield and control — but it’s not. It doesn’t work like that, it _never_ works like that.”

That’s not… entirely true, in Robin’s mere and humble experience with it, but he pushes the argument back, bites his tongue and turns his thoughts toward prompts to keep her talking. “How does it work, then?”

Regina huffs out an entirely unamused chuckle against him, but it’s not directed at him, he thinks. “On its own terms, how else? It has an entirely different set of laws and occasionally robs you of your free will and makes existing in the mortal realm a thousand times more complicated and difficult if not fucking impossible. They’re used to this madness in the Other Realm.”

A smile plays at his lips, he cannot help it, and the teasing spills forth before he can stop it. “Yes,” he muses, “Snow seems far less traumatized at the memory of being turned into a tree than Belle does of losing her nose for an afternoon.” Her answering _tsk_ and gentle nudge of his leg tells him that she doesn’t find it particularly amusing, but he feels the way she relaxes against him, just a little, and counts it as a win. He takes a beat to sober up before trying again. “I know it can be a bit… much at times,” he offers, eyes casting around the kitchen, “and I know this particular… incident is probably not something you wanted to deal with even on your best day, much less after the last few weeks —”

“It’s not that,” she sighs, sagging against him a bit more. “It’s just — I wish it didn’t have so much influence over how I have to live my life from one day to the next. I wish I didn’t have to give Luna a heads up every time we have company over. I wish I didn’t have to keep coming up with thin excuses as to why they’re not allowed to go in the linen closet. I wish I didn’t have to put away the cauldron and the spare toaster. I wish — _god_ ,” she chuckles, and it’s not quite dark, but it’s nowhere near light, either. “I wish I didn’t have to come up with a battle plan to get rid of a lint gremlin and I wish I didn’t have to constantly rely on that stupid spell book and I wish I could just come home from work and not be attacked with an idiom interpretation in our own goddamn kitchen.”

“Okay, hey,” he murmurs, hushing soothingly as he drops a kiss atop her head and rubs his hand along her arm. “Just… breathe for a minute, alright?”

She exhales heavily against him, shaky and uneven, and turns her face against his chest, hand reaching into fist his shirt tight for a moment. “I just don’t like it,” she mutters against him, sounding a bit petulant. “I don’t like not having…”

_Control_ , Robin’s mind supplies, but it’s out there even without saying it aloud, so he reaches up to lace the fingers of his free hand with hers and murmurs a soft _I know_ against her brow. He moves his other hand from her shoulder up to the nape of her neck, brushes lightly against her skin before sinking his fingers into her hair. It’s enough for now, he thinks, doesn’t need to pry and push and prompt her into delving more (shouldn’t, really, not if he knows what’s good for him — for them both), and he’s grateful for the ease with which she allows them to lapse into a comfortable silence, his fingers carding through her hair as he waits for some of the tension to bleed out of her.

And he’s a bit surprised to find now that he’s thinking about it, really, properly giving the matter some thought, that there is so much more to Regina’s frustrations than wanting to have the upper hand — than having the power to wield control. He feels a bit of shame in that — not for the more typical presumptions of a mortal but for the sheer amount of time it’s taken for the real problem to sink in, to get to the heart of the matter. Seven years he’s been with Regina, and while it’d taken a full year for her little secret to come out, he’s more disappointed than anything else to realize that all of his observation and experience over the course of their relationship hadn’t equipped him to realize _this_.

Because yes, his wife is a bit… particular about things, likes things in a certain way and prefers to know as much as possible about a matter at any given time (she does not, _does not_ like surprises), but she’s never been the sort to try and wield any sort of influence over the choices of others — over mind and memory and matters of the heart alike. It’d been too important to her, she’d told him, after what had happened to her first love, that she not interfere in the lives of others, that she not let _magic_ dictate what her impact on those around her could be — especially when the fact that it had been used _against her_ so cruelly is taken into account.

But magic, as they’ve been not too kindly reminded at the moment, has a mind of its own, and even in the instances where mere mishaps and mayhem occur, he thinks he can see her frustration and ire now more for what it really is. The lack of agency _bothers_ her, most likely to a frightening degree, and he can only imagine how trying it’s been over the last thirteen years to try and have some semblance of what he supposes constitutes a normal life when not all of the choices she makes are of her own volition. Magic often forces her hand, and she is so, _so_ careful about the way she wields it, exercises as much caution as she possibly can and tries to minimize any damage that might occur.

(Daniel is a scar long since left behind, and Regina bears him more than Robin would ever care to admit.)

She _cares_ , his Regina, more so than most, and Robin has spent every moment of the last six years leaning into that without so much as a second thought. Because he _does_ trust her, implicitly so, and even when magic’s reach stretches out to touch him, he feels neither sting nor burn, not with Regina as a balm between them. He has never been anything more than curious since he learned of her whole identity, has always sought to discover and experience the world she’d stumbled into at sixteen — to learn and love every spellbinding piece of the woman who has enchanted him since he’d first laid eyes upon her seven years ago. His entire world had changed with the discovery of hers, and he has not stopped to think, much, at the ways in which hers has been altered, too.

Regina feels things _deeply_ , and magic has cost her much over the years, snatching up pieces of her heart every time she straddles the line between this realm and the Other and refuses to budge an inch. And Robin finds that he’s now a bit unsure, really, of how precious little she’s left for herself — what pieces are left for her to possess with pride and protect. Because Regina does _not_ hate magic — she doesn’t, nothing in the world could convince him of that. Not with the way she’d supplied every request for a history lesson with leather bound books and borrowed scrolls; not with the way she’d stopped trying to hide any exhibition the moment he learned the truth. For all that his wife limits her visits to the Other Realm to exactly once a year (and only for an hour at that), he knows that she views magic as much a part of the fabric of her being as he does, relishes in being able to use it day-to-day at home on the good days and doubles down on trying to learn from magic’s mistakes on the bad ones.

And he realizes, then, that perhaps he’d misconstrued the twist in his chest as shame, before. Robin _knows_ his wife, hat to heart to broom, and without the murkiness of guilt to cloud his judgement, he thinks that maybe it’s not that he didn’t understand; maybe it’s because he _does_.

Because he _has_ spent the last several years observing, studying her, and even if he hadn’t been totally conscious of it, Robin’s inclinations have always been the same, too. He trusts Regina to navigate her way through magical mishaps, trusts her to keep them safe and to press on even when it’s hard. He hasn’t had much other option, really, because no amount of books or scrolls or stories can really enable him to match magic, not when he doesn’t possess it himself. And _that_ , he thinks, has bothered him; it’s a different sort of lack of agency, an inability to _help_. As a result, all of Robin’s efforts have gone toward orbiting his wife like a star, plucking out pieces of his own heart to patch up hers and keep her burning brighter, longer.

She has bewitched him, body and soul, and the ache in his chest takes the shape of a stone from a distant star.

All he can do is keep trying.

Her body’s a heavier weight against him now, fingers going lax in his over the space of several moments, and he takes comfort in the fact that her breathing has slowed, seems to come more easily now. He’d made the right call, he thinks, in holding back a bit, and in the space of a heartbeat he realizes that she’d needed nothing more than a few of her own to feel like she had the space to be herself. The ache in his chest burns into yearning at that, and he’s careful in the way he adjusts his back against the cabinets, breath coming out sharply through his nose as he pulls his focus back to the present.

He wants to help, he does, but he’s fumbling a bit, here, for the right way to do it. The obvious solution is to clean up this bounty of bread, but even in that he’s unsure. He doesn’t know if she’s tried to clean up the mess herself, but regardless, him offering to do it instead could be met with either ire or gratitude. They definitely can’t leave it, though — she wouldn’t be able to relax, knowing it’s all still here. So Robin weighs his options, glances around the kitchen as best he can in this position and tries to properly take in the state of things. There’s so _much_ of it, piled high and pressed against every surface, tucked into every corner. Even — bloody hell, even the damn oven is crammed full of them, and Robin barely suppresses a groan at the sight; he’s leaning more and more toward asking Regina to indulge in a little magic to clean this up, after all.

He shifts his gaze away toward the island counter and then stops, doing a bit of a double take as his eyes land upon pile of pastries… pouring out of the oven.

Out, not in.

Robin narrows his eyes, brow wrinkling a little in concentration as he takes a closer look at the foray of food in front of them, trying to discern one from the next. Idly, he makes a mental list as he peruses: pretzel, cinnamon, currant and cream; sesame and hot cross and honey and sticky. There’s even Bánh bao, up by the sink, and pan de los muertos, down by her feet. And then he sees a penny, tucked by his side, and his heart skips a beat at the thing that’s implied.

“Regina?” he murmurs, breath caught in his chest. “You… said this was an idiom interpretation?” He feels her tense against him, just a hair, and she knows — she _knows_ where he’s going with this. Her quiet _mmhmm_ is entirely unnecessary, and he feels the way each breath she takes is measured and deep. “They’re all… buns.”

A beat, and then, “They are.”

Oh — _oh_.

Robin turns back to face her and shifts a bit, pulling away just enough to prompt her to straighten up and not lean against him quite so much. “Regina,” he breathes, and his heart is a drum against his sternum, “are you —”

“I’m surprised it took you this long to catch on,” she says — _quips_ , really, and her tone is lighter than before. But the tension’s not gone, the nerves are still there: he can hear it in the edges of her voice, see it in her eyes, the way she worries her lip when she sits up the rest of the way and looks over at him properly.

He tries to take a breath and fails, tries again and has no words for her, too floored, at the moment, to offer up any sort of reaction at all, much less platitudes or soothing words. He blinks, once or twice or maybe three times, tries to pull himself together and orient himself to the stark shift in subject. His eyes are drawn, once again, to the pastries in the kitchen — the _buns_ , bloody hell, no wonder she’s been nearly vibrating out of her skin. And then he stops, considers the sheer magnitude of what they’re surrounded by, and the first thing out of his mouth is, “Why are there so many of them?”

Her lips twist and it’s an almost-smile, cheeks tinging a bit as she settles back against the lower cabinets and turns her gaze back to the idiom infestation. “There weren’t, to begin with,” she replies, sounding almost indifferent about it, but Robin knows his wife well enough to know when she’s putting on. “There was one, last week — a penny, like that one there. I didn’t think much of it at the time.”

“And… obviously it wasn’t the last,” he surmises, a gentle prompting to continue.

She shakes her head almost imperceptibly, lips turning down into not quite a frown as she recalls the memories for him. “Another, Saturday night, a cinnamon on Sunday.” A pause, and then, “Apparently I wasn’t getting the hint, so when I got home today, I guess the magical mechanism at play decided it needed to really hit me in the face with it.”

He hesitates for half a moment, lips pursing in a valiant effort not to so much as cough a chuckle, before he asks, “...Did they literally hit you in the face? Is that why your face is all covered in flour?” He reaches out, gently traces a fingertip through the dusting on one cheek, and where Robin had withheld his laughter, Regina does not.

Her answering chuckle is wet, weighted, and she doesn’t even bother reaching up to try and wipe her face off. “Sort of? I went to pull one of the cookbooks off of the counter next to the stove and the oven door just sort of… flew open on its own and suddenly there was this giant cloud of flour dust in the air and everything just sort of came spilling out onto the floor.” Another pause, this one a little longer, and the smile she turns on him is wry, sleepy. “Needless to say, I got the hint after that.”

His answering smile is smaller, more restrained as he scoots a little closer, knee brushing up against hers. “But they still wouldn’t stop?”

“No, they did,” she says, “but even after I’d figured out what was going on, they didn’t disappear. And that was — it didn’t make sense, because there’s always a way to reverse an idiom, and there wasn’t really a whole lot I could think of that I could actually _do_ short of accepting its truth. So I tried to use magic to get rid of them and then they just sort of… multiplied,” she sighs, gesturing aimlessly around the kitchen. “Probably a failsafe mechanism,” she mutters, sounding a little irritated even as she shrugs her shoulders, “to prevent an easy fix.”

The ache in his chest is back at that, but it’s less a twist this time and more a steady thrumming, an undercurrent pushing him closer. He reaches out, rests a hand on her thigh and squeezes soothingly, and while she doesn’t lean into him this time she does finally close her eyes to the mischievous mess magic has created and rests her head back against the cabinet with a dull _thunk_. It’s the reversal, he realizes, that’s the not-so-literal thorn in her side at the moment — a prickly distraction from the reality of what lies beneath.

What it is the idiom _means_ , for them.

He leaves her be for a moment to collect herself again, keeps his hand on her thigh and glares back out at the offending plethora of pastries. It seems a bit overkill to include a failsafe as overwhelmingly inconvenient as this; he doesn’t know why just simply refusing to let magic work isn’t enough to impress the point upon her. But magic has a mind of his own —it never works that way — and Robin thinks he has a bit more clarity, now, exactly how much ire magic has stirred up in his wife over the years.

And then a thought occurs to him, sinks down and twists his stomach into knots as he looks back at her, concerned. “...Idioms don’t work in reverse, do they?”

Her lips turn down, nose wrinkling as she clearly contemplates his meaning, but her whole face softens and relaxes after little more than a few seconds. She lolls her head to the side and opens her eyes to look at him, irises warm and smile a bit bemused as she considers him. “No,” she assures him, and she genuinely sounds like she’s trying not to laugh at him. “It’d go against the fundamental laws of magic.”

He breathes easier at that, knot unfurling, and worries quelled, Robin moves closer still, mirrors her position slightly and rests his head against the cabinet, arm brushing against hers. “So.”

Regina works her jaw, just a tick, but it’s feigned annoyance, teasing at best. “So,” she parrots, clearly challenging him to try prying this out of her properly and _there_ she is, his Regina, tempting him with all that fire.

Robin bites his lip, grinning as he leans in, hand hooking along her inner thigh to keep them close. He hovers there, just a breath and a half away from her lips, and where she fails at holding his gaze (hers falls to his lips, his mouth, equally tempted), Robin cannot take his eyes off of her. “So we’re —”

“I don’t know,” she interjects abruptly, breathless as she ducks her head just enough to deny them both the kiss that had been lingering in the air. “I mean I don’t — I’m not _certain_ , but…” Another pause and she’s hedging, deliberately dragging this out even with the shift in mood. He realizes, then, that she’s afraid to lend voice to it, afraid to _let it_ be more real, and he suddenly finds that he is not at all surprised that magic’s mechanisms will not let her out of this one so easily. “It certainly… _seems_ that way,” she admits at last, pulling back and glancing over her shoulder at the offending oven.

He doesn’t follow her pull but he cannot bring himself to remove his hand; he knows she needs the tether, even if she won’t ask for it, but more than that he needs it, too — an anchor to keep him grounded while the entire world shifts around them again. “So you’re not taking this as proof positive, then?”

Regina’s nose scrunches up a bit as she turns back around, the noise she lets out equal parts bemoaning and bemused. “Please don’t,” she mutters, looking down at her lap. “I have had more than enough of my fair share of baking related idioms today.”

Robin falters a bit, pushes himself away from the cabinets and makes to move a little closer. “I was only —”

“I know,” she sighs, heavy and weary and worn, but she moves to rest her hand over his, keeping him in place. She doesn’t quite look up at him all the way, focuses her gaze somewhere just to the right of him, he thinks, and there’s something altogether melancholic in her eyes, her voice tinged with traces of defeat when she speaks. “I just… I wanted this _one_ thing to be mine, you know?” she poses quietly, one shoulder shrugging marginally as the melancholy seeps down into her smile. “Every time we talked about it, I always thought it would be normal — _mortal_. I never really gave a second thought to what it would be like with magic involved, which is silly, really, I don’t know _why_ I never took it into consideration.”

“Because you didn’t always have to,” Robin reminds her gently, trying to get her to come round. “Magic wasn’t always part of your life. You spent nearly half your life never having to account for its influence or impact.”

She scoffs a bit at that, smile turning a bit sour. “Yeah, well, I do now,” she argues, derisive and a little bitter. “You know, most people get to find out in a normal way. They take a test or skip a period or their stomach starts to turn over. Me? I get to be assaulted by a wave of buns cascading out of my oven.” Her eyes cast all the way back down, then, chin tucked against her chest, and she’s closer to tears, he thinks, then she was ever prepared for or even wanted to be. “I just… wanted this to be the one thing that magic didn’t touch,” she whispers. “I wanted it to be mine.”

His first instinct is to disagree — to argue and remind her that she _is_ magic, and magic does not make her — but he bites it back, swallows it down and ignores the way it burns hollow in his chest. She _does_ need the reassurance, his Regina, but platitudes alone are not enough — are never enough, really, but especially now. There’s more to her leaning into her mortality than just simplicity, he realizes; she _wants_ that perception, however misconstrued it may be.

She wants to have some semblance of control.

(He tries very hard not to dwell on the sheer irony of that — that his witch of a wife doesn’t feel _empowered_.)

So Robin turns his hand over into hers and grips gently, ducking down and leaning in to try and get her to look at him again. “So make it yours.”

It takes a long few seconds, but she does lift her head to meet his eyes, and her lashes are already wet. “And how exactly do you propose I do that?” she asks, sounding skeptical.

“You said this wasn’t enough to make you certain,” he reminds her, casting a half-glance at the mess in the kitchen. “Decide what will.”

She barks out a wet laugh at that, purses her lips and shakes her head fondly at him. “Well, of those options, one has already happened, and I can’t really magic my way into morning sickness — _god_ ,” she groans, tossing her head back a bit, “what I wouldn’t give to have morning sickness right now.” She’s quiet for a beat before looking back at him, corners of her lips turning down. “That sounds awful, doesn’t it?”

It’s his turn to shake his head, smiling softly as he makes to close the rest of the distance between them. “It sounds like,” he offers warmly, “you’re a bit toward the end of your rope at the present. But,” he adds, “out of just the options you listed alone, you’ve still got one left, and that one’s easy to claim ownership of. So I’d suggest that, for the time being, we leave this little… magical mess alone — I know, I know,” he says quickly, cutting off her impending protest at the pass, “it’s just going to drive you mad, knowing it’s all still just sitting here, but I think any more attempts to get rid of them might just make it worse.”

“Don’t jinx it,” Regina mutters under her breath.

“Leave it,” he laughs lightly. “I’ll make a quick run down to the pharmacy for you, and in the meantime _you_ ,” he murmurs, reaching up to cradle her jaw with his free hand, thumb sweeping through the flour dusted across her cheeks, “can go upstairs and wash up.”

She blinks at the layer of white on his fingers when he pulls away, clearly having forgotten about the flour bomb from earlier, and does a double take as she takes in her appearance — flour smudged and smeared across the black of her skirt, lower legs smattered with the sticky remnants of some of the buns that have pressed against her skin. She reaches up her own free hand to her face, fingertips ghosting over where the flour has dusted her skin before falling, trailing down the length of her neck. “It’s in my hair, isn’t it?”

Robin bites his lip _hard_ to keep from laughing. “A bit, yeah.”

Regina huffs out a groan, but he’s encouraged by the way she curls in close again, forehead resting upon his shoulder. “Okay,” she mumbles around a sigh, sounding a touch miserable. “I’ll go do that while you… get what I need,” she says, and her voice has gone a bit airy, breath warm and heavy against his collar. She hesitates for half a moment longer, just barely squeezes the hand she’s still holding before she lifts her head to look at him again, nerves apparent in her eyes. “And then…”

“And then we do this together,” he says quietly, tilting her chin up toward him, “and make it ours.”

Navigating their way out of the kitchen proves to be more of a perilous journey than he thinks either of them had anticipated, even up on tip-toe and armed with spatulas. They do manage to escape, hands clasped tight, but they linger maybe a moment or two longer at the bottom of the back staircase than is strictly necessary. Regina is the one to lean in this time, palms pressed against his chest as she arches up on the balls of her feet and finally captures his lips in a proper kiss, and Robin can do little else other than curl his hands around to the small of her back and hold her close as she sets him alight.

She is _magic_ , his Regina, and it doesn’t really start to sink in until he is long gone and standing in aisle nine that she is, more than likely at this point given all the evidence thus far, also the mother of his child.

Robin smiles, big and warm and bright right there in the middle of the aisle in front of the family planning shelves, and he probably looks like a right idiot at the moment but cannot bring himself to care. It’s… unexpected, to say the least, very much unplanned. Oh they’ve talked about it, to be sure, but it’s always been a _later_ instead of a _now_ or even a _soon_. Their priorities — their _focus_ has always been elsewhere, on academia and work and relatives and wedding planning and publishing deadlines. They’re on the other side of most of that, now, so he supposes now is as good a time as any for it to happen, but where Regina does not like surprises, Robin can’t say he feels the same.

Every unexpected happenstance, every surprise Regina has brought into his life in the last seven years has always brought him joy, in some fashion or another. She had granted him trust in both her magic and mortality alike, had opened an entire world for him, and the prospect of this now has the possibilities of another unfolding in his mind. He thinks of the ways in which things will change, anticipates Luna’s inevitable complaints and promises of protection, envisions the alterations to the house, magical mobiles and baby gate in front of the linen closet alike. He pictures Regina’s smile, the one she saves for her students, imagines the way it will soften around the edges for their child and the guiding hand she’ll have in milestones both mortal and magic.

And he thinks — he thinks of his own alterations, then, of the lengths he has gone to try and change the way this realm sees the other, to bridge the gap across the great divide: thesis and book and carefully constructed courses combined. He considers all that he has done to try and make an impression — to make a difference — and realizes that the opportunity to pass that along, to shape and mould and guide someone new into influencing change for the better, to leave the world a little better than when they’d entered it, is rapidly approaching reality. And with that comes a flood of images all in a rush: the dim hue of late nights in a nursery; the gentle tap of Luna’s paw against a pair of tiny hands and feet exploring every surface within reach; the spark of wonder in a pair of eyes through the smoke of a cauldron; a host of bookshelves lining every wall, shelves crammed full from one end to the other; a child curled up against Regina’s side, a place to feel safe when they otherwise might feel a bit out of place.

He is _blinded_ by the vision of a smile bright, and kind, and his heart threatens to beat out of his chest, ready to lay itself down on the line.

With the box in his hands and his heart fit to burst, Robin hopes that the idiom interpretation holds true, and that they’ve managed to make a little magic of their own.

* * * * *

Regina is having a staring contest with a box — and _losing_.

She’s been sitting here at the edge of the tub long enough that the steam and heat from her shower is mostly gone, her hair more damp and her fingers and toes almost smooth again. He’d dropped it off on the counter, Robin, while she was still in the shower, and even though she’d known it was coming — that it was sitting there, waiting for her — the sight of it when she pushed back the shower curtain was still a little unsettling, like it’d appeared out of thin air.

(She supposes she should count her blessings that the idiom hadn’t twisted itself that far.)

So she’s… here, bathrobe cinched tight around her waist, toes digging into the soft bath mat and fingers curling around the edge of the tub as she faces down the box like it’s full of tricks — like there’s magic, to uncover. She huffs out a sharp breath at the memory that pulls on, and for a minute she is sixteen all over again, sitting cross-legged on her bed and staring at at a book, leather-bound and full of spells, fingertips dancing delicately over the embossed eyes upon the cover. Her eyes slip shut, now, retreating into the space the memory has made in her mind, and she can almost _smell the lavender of Aunt Morgana’s potion brewing downstairs, the sound of the linen closet’s_ boom-clap _of thunder a ringing echo in her ears as the door slams shut behind Mother for the second time in eleven years_.

Regina swallows the hurt down, wincing at the way it burns and blisters the wounds she thought she’d patched up. Five and motherless; fifteen and orphaned. The world tilted and spun, at sixteen; love lost, two years later. She hovers there, in the in between of the memories of her mind, longing to fill the spaces Daniel had left vacant. She’d been virtually alone after she’d lost him to the idiom; she’d had Luna, yes, and eventually Snow, and Zelena, but in so many ways it had felt like the echoes of emptiness she’d felt so many times over.

Aunt Morgana had been the one to fill Mother’s shoes, once Regina had turned sixteen and been told the truth, but her teachings — her involvement, really, had always been a bit… hands off, flighty and inconsistent. Regina had learned so much on her own simply through study or trial and error, and even then there are still days when she feels like she did rather poorly. She is not her sisters, or her mother; magic does not come naturally to her.

She is only half, after all.

She is, at the end of every day, her father’s daughter, and magic could not make up for the the guidance he’d given her when he was alive.

It’d been that, really — every lesson her father had taught her, every tool he’d equipped her with to face challenges head on — that has gotten her through the roughest of her magical mishaps over the last thirteen years. He’d helped her connect the misshapen pieces in her mind, had led her down logic’s path between them. When there wasn’t logic to be found, when she could never quite make sense of something no matter how hard she tried, he had given her something in its place, too. Regina had trusted him, implicitly so (still does, in some ways, for all that he’s technically dead and she only shares an hour’s worth of conversation with him every year), but his greatest gift, she thinks, had been passed along to her through a hand on the small of her back and a whisper in her ear: _Trust your gut, mija. You are the only one who knows which path is right for you_.

And for every wall she’d found in her way, he’d simply taken her hand and pulled her a small step back.

_You can only move forward. These walls do not define you._

When she’d lost him the Thanksgiving before her sixteenth birthday, she’d taken two steps back and stumbled into sitting down, unable to even _think_ about moving forward. And for the first couple of months, that’s where she stayed: in pieces on the ground, lost without light and still very much alone. She hadn’t even gotten to three months, though, before the moon had risen and her body had aged into another year, and with it came the stark realization that the path she’d been on was about to take a sharp left turn. Aunt Morgana had taken her hand and gently tugged, but Mother came along and _yanked_ Regina to her feet, shoving a book into her hands and pushing her closer to the wall.

(Toward abandoning her grief, and her mortality, and every last memory of Daddy, and picking up old baggage anew again.)

For a moment, that book was nothing she wanted and everything she needed it to be all at once. She was in no way ready to face that wall, to try and find a way to surpass it, but there was so much… _more_ beyond it — the promise not of what could be, but of who she was meant to be. The book in her hands had been the only way to uncover more pieces.

So Regina had opened the cover, to the aged and musty first page, and while the wall in front of her had disappeared, there was a definitive _click_ of a door closing shut behind her.

_You can only move forward_ , Daddy had said, and even when it wasn’t always her choice, Regina has put one foot in front of the other and pressed on.

There is so _much_ she has been forced to do on her own.

She does not have to do that now.

The breath she takes through her nose is sharp but measured, fingers and toes flexing to stop the fidgeting, and she tries very, very hard to ignore the churning of anxiety in her stomach when she squares her shoulders and opens her eyes, staring the box down. She can only move forward, and the door in front of her, once opened, can never be shut again.

_Make it yours_ , Robin said, and the definitions untold are left for Regina to to define.

So Regina pushes herself to her feet and plucks the stupid box from the counter, eyes skimming over the directions inside. She doesn’t know why she bothers, really, it’s not that hard, honestly, but it’s unconscious, the little ways she keeps stalling for time. But that’s… really the last of it — there’s nothing at all practical to delay her any longer — so she makes quick work of it to get it over with, washes her hands in the sink and takes the stick from the counter before finally emerging from the bathroom.

She finds Robin waiting for her in the bedroom, propped up against the headboard and legs sprawled out over the bed. He’s changed out of his work clothes since he got back from the drug store, pulled on a pair of worn jeans and the midnight blue henley she likes so much, the one that brings out his eyes. The sun’s still filtering in through the bedroom window, hasn’t quite begun to set yet, but the lamp on his nightstand table is switched on to give him better light to read by. His reading glasses are perched on his nose as his eyes flit left to right over the pages of one of the books from his summer reading list, and for a moment the anxiety in her stomach dissipates to make room for the abrupt punch of arousal she feels at the sight of him.

_Focus, Mills. That’s what got you here in the first place._

His gaze shifts up as she lingers in the doorway, eyes meeting hers for the space of a heartbeat before he’s gently closing his book and reaching up to pull his glasses off. She takes advantage of his brief distraction as he sets his things aside to cross the threshold into the bedroom and move toward the bed, tightening the tie on her bathrobe a little more to keep it in place. He stills a little when he looks back at her; she can feel him studying her as she sets the stick down on her nightstand and climbs onto the bed next to him. “Is it —-”

“Needs more time,” she dismisses, deliberately turning away from it in favor of shifting a little closer to him. She reaches for the ties of her robe again, fidgets and smooths her fingers over the material, knot to end and back again. It’s… better, in here, warmer and less confined, and while being around Robin almost always makes her feel more settled, she finds that she can’t quite look him in the eye, not yet and oh, there’s the anxiety flaring up again, fantastic.

“Regina,” he ventures, quiet, careful, and she draws in a deep breath when his fingers brush against her exposed knee, “I know we’ve talked about this, but if — if you’ve changed your mind, or you’re not ready, then —”

“It’s not that,” she rushes to assure him, and her eyes find his with surprising ease, steady and sure and soothing. She feels a smile playing at the corner of her lips, but it’s muted around the edges, not quite ready to blossom. “Honestly, I probably would’ve been ready two years ago. But now that it’s… an impending reality, I —” She falters here, out of words and unsure exactly where she’s trying to go with this, and her gaze grows unfocused as she tries to pull her pieces together and make sense of them.

Her vision comes back to sharp clarity almost immediately, though, when Robin reaches out to tuck her hair behind her ear, hand falling to rest upon her thigh again, an echo of the gesture in the kitchen earlier. “Facing the prospect makes you think about it differently,” he guesses, but he’s so, so careful in the way he says it, gentle and even and without any traces of judgment or disappointment.

She loves him for that, achingly so, and the smile that finally makes its way onto her face is a little broken, chased by a laugh that sounds too hollow to her ears and punctuated with a stinging at her eyes. “Nothing about this is going to be normal, you know that, right?”

“Because of the magic?”

She nods, just barely, and her gaze grows unfocused again as she tries to remember what the prospect of this was like before today — before last week, really, when she started getting gentle nudges that her life was on the cusp of another sharp turn. “I just — I never really factored magic into the thought of us having kids, you know? And I know — _I know_ that sounds silly, that it never occurred to me, but it didn’t. So _much_ of my life is rooted _here_ , Robin. Magic doesn’t just… _change_ the fact that I’m half-mortal, that I grew up that way or that I’ve chosen to live my life here. And _now_...”

She takes a beat to just… breathe for a few seconds, maybe a little surprised that thoughts she’s kept buried have somehow transformed into words and are bubbling up out of her faster than she thinks either of them really anticipated. But this, too, is helping, gives her anxiety some sort of direction so it doesn’t continue to fester, and Robin comes into crystal clarity with ease again, waiting and warm and wonderful. “Now that this is… more than likely happening,” she says, still hedging around accepting it as defined for at least a few minutes more, “and with what happened in the kitchen, I kind of _have to_ factor magic into our plans.”

“And you feel like it’s forced your hand a bit,” Robin supplies, and that’s… true, she supposes, but it’s not all of it.

“I feel like… raising kids is a big enough of undertaking on its own,” she sighs, bringing a hand down over where his is resting on her thigh. It’s not lost on her that it’s the first time she’s so much as thought of such a defining word, much less spoken one, and _kids_ lingers over her lips, buzzing against her skin. “Trying to raise _magical_ kids — and they _will_ be magical, Robin,” she points out gently, trying to gauge any shift in his expression. “It doesn’t matter that I’m half. Our kids are going to have magic, and there’s going to be more than one of them, at _least_ two — I’m still a Grant even if I don’t speak to my mother, and things are… better, since Zelena and I petitioned for alterations. We get to raise our kids _together_ — I mean, god, I can’t even _imagine_ being forced to separate them — but no injunction is going to abolish a centuries old family secret. And the thought of raising them here, in the mortal realm, is just… a whole other set of issues.”

His brow crinkles at that, just a touch but she notices, and her mouth snaps abruptly shut when he draws in a quick breath to speak. “How do you mean?”

“I mean there’s so much more we have to wonder and worry about,” she explains, and the words are spilling out of her now, each one a match to the buns that had flowed like a river from their oven. “There’s so much I haven’t ever considered, things like — like how early their magic will start to manifest. It didn’t make itself known to me until I was much older, but what if it’s different for them? What if it starts working when they’re young — when they’re _babies_? How do we hide that from other mortals, from people, from — god, from your _parents_? I mean, I know — _you_ know how much meddling and magical memory modification I did in high school, but I don’t know the first thing about masking inherit magic from an _infant_. And I won’t — I _won’t_ use magic on someone without their knowledge or consent, not anymore, Robin, not after —”

“I know,” he murmurs, shifting his hand under hers so he can lace their fingers together. “It’s alright, darling, I know.”

Regina huffs out a sharp breath through her nose but doesn’t pull her hand away, just squeezes his hand a touch too tight and drops her gaze to the place they touch. The fingers of her free hand reach over for the bracelet on the opposite wrist automatically, thumb digging under the small space left between the silver and her skin and twitching, twisting idly. She thinks she can feel him tense a little in her hand, but she’s too far into this to shift her focus, can only trust that he knows it’s a nervous, agitated tick. And he does, he knows, of course he knows that, he’s been by her side for seven years and made moments to mark the time.

“It’ll be years, you know,” she says softly. “It’ll be years before our kids realize that they’re… different, more before they’ll understand it and longer still to know they’ll have to keep it a secret. They won’t — it’s not going to really sink in at first, why. They won’t be able to grasp the gravity of it until they’re a little older, and I have… _no_ idea how to handle that,” she admits, hands spasming a bit as a new wave of anxiety ripples through her. Regina pulls away from him without thinking, runs her fingers through her hair and moves across the mattress. She swings her legs over the side and grips the edge tight, eyes squeezed shut as she tries desperately not to let herself spiral too much.

(The earth has already moved too much today.)

“I’m curious,” Robin ventures, and she can feel the mattress shift under his weight as he moves closer to her. “Is all of this something you’ve… been holding onto for a while, or is it just becoming apparent to you now that we’ve had ourselves a bit of an _oops_?”

Her eyes snap open at that, fingers unfurling from where they’d been gripping the edge of the bed, and the look she throws him is equal parts amused and accusing. “This _oops_ ,” she says, “is probably your fault, you know.”

“ _My_ fault?” Robin laughs, and he’s trying to fake offense but he’s beaming, his hand finding purchase behind her as he leans in a little closer, mischief apparent in his eyes. “If I recall, this sort of thing does take two.”

Her lips twist with the effort not to smile, and she leans in a little closer, too. “My being a willing participant does not mean the fault lies with me. If anything, I’m pretty sure this is a result of you being a little quick on the draw over Fourth of July,” she reminds him. He flat out _grins_ at the reminder, effectively pulling the smile out of her and the memory forward — the two of them pressed against the wall in Ruby’s bathroom, trying desperately to keep quiet and oh, _oh_ , that’s… not distracting at all.

_Focus, Mills_.

“If that’s the case, then I will happily take the blame, but you still haven’t answered the question,” he points out. “It sounds like you’ve given this a fair bit of thought, is all. But downstairs in the kitchen earlier, and just a few moments ago again, you said you’ve never really factored magic into all of this.”

“I haven’t,” Regina defends, lips pursing a little at the way he arches an eyebrow at her. “I… had some time to think, after you left, that’s all.” 

“Ah,” he replies, the barest hint of a laugh in his voice. “And you fell down a bit of a rabbit hole, it seems.”

“ _Careful_ ,” Regina warns, narrowing her eyes a little. “I am not in the mood to deal with another idiom interpretation. So no quips about how my thoughts tend to run away with themselves, or I can’t see the forest for the trees because _I swear to god_ , Robin Locksley, if a goddamn willow starts to come up through the basement, I’ll —”

“The point is,” he cuts in, managing to sound only a touch exasperated with her as he sits up a little straighter, “that I _know_ you, darling, and I know what you’re like when you become lost in _what if_ s.” She clamps her mouth shut at that, teeth digging into her bottom lip as she tries very, very hard not to think about how too close to home that hits right about now. But Robin sees — he always sees, she is an open book, to him — and subsequently scoots a little closer, reaching out to take her hand in his. “Our children will have magic,” he affirms quietly, clearly trying to bring them back to the issue at hand. “That is cause for concern in some cases, certainly, but it doesn’t — I just don’t quite understand,” he settles on. “I’m having a bit of trouble grasping why you feel ill-equipped to handle that.”

Her eyes fall to their hands, focus on the glint of amethyst on her left hand, the way it shines against the backdrop of the silver on his. It’s an easy reminder, the band around his finger, of just how much she’d come to trust him, how he’d given her back so much of what had been buried in the ground, and the warmth of his hand against hers is enough to quell her anxiety to a quiet simmer. “I just… I have no idea where to even begin,” she admits, soft and low. “I don’t know where to start to teach our children about magic — how to use it or control it or develop it.”

“Says the middle school teacher to the college professor,” Robin murmurs close to her ear, reaching out with his free hand to brush some of the hair away from her face.

She turns into his hand, pain sticking at the back of her throat. “I’m being serious.”

He softens a little around the edges, tucks her hair behind her ear and lets his fingers fall to the nape of her neck, brushing idly. “I know,” he say quietly. “I wasn’t — I just meant that you have the skill set. I didn’t mean it to sound dismissive.”

“I know,” she sighs, eyes slipping shut as she turns away a little. She leans into the way Robin’s fingers start to rub at the back of her neck, feels a little of the tension melt out of her at the touch. “I know I’m capable — I half taught myself most of the things I know about magic now — but I don’t have any misguided illusions about being able to control or cover up the magical habits of a toddler, _believe me_ ,” she says, a bit dry, but the edge is gone almost as soon as it had cut its way into her tone, leaving behind a chasm of an open wound for her voice to try and traverse. “I just — I don’t want them to feel out of place,” she breathes, and the air in her lungs is heavier than before, harder to lift and let go. “I don’t want them to feel like they can’t be themselves or like it’s something to be ashamed of, or that they have to compartmentalize all the time. I just — there isn’t a way to make this simple for them, to make it easy. My experience is still fairly… limited. At some point, I’m going to run out of answers.”

“That’s okay, you know,” he says gently, and it’s every bit the reassurance she’s sure he means it as. “If you can’t supply the knowledge or know-how or solutions, we have other options. Luna’s here, for the more immediate problems. I know Mal and Morgana are a bit harder to get hold of, but I’m sure either of them would be willing to help. And you have your sisters,” he points out, and there’s a weight to the way he mentions them, an emphasis she’s sure he doesn’t want her to miss. “Snow has all of the practical teaching experience, and Zelena’s mostly self-taught. Between them I’m sure they’ve enough to fill the gaps for you — they’d probably jump at the chance to do it. We can turn to any one of them, if need be.”

The pain in her throat is sharp around the edges now, and it touches all of the worst places as she swallows it down, down, down. It has tears stinging at her eyes worse than before, wet and warm and wild, and it’s all she can do to keep her eyes shut to keep them at bay. The breath she draws is shallow, still heavy, and the wound across her throat bleeds fresh into her voice. “I know we can,” she says thickly, body stiffening a little as the last of her anxiety warps itself into words, “but I feel like I shouldn’t have to.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Robin breathes, “darling, come here.” She scoots over and curls against him easily now, most of the anxiety out of her system and leaving open the more miserable, aching parts of this whole mess in her mind. He wraps an arm around her and pulls her to him, gentle but firm, keeps hold of her hand and drops a kiss atop her head.

“I _hate_ that she’s made me resent her this much,” she says, just shy of a gasp. “I never had a choice, with her. She made me a witch, but only by half. She left me behind. She pulled me into this whole world before I was really ready for it, and all of that together meant that I was always going to be at a disadvantage. And it’s not — I wouldn’t have wanted her to stay, or to take me with her,” she amends, and her eyes open at last, gaze falling and catching to the ring on his hand — to the ghost of the person who’d worn it before him. “Daddy gave me more than I ever needed. He helped me figure out how to make myself into the person I wanted to be, and I wouldn’t trade that for _anything_ , but… it meant the cost of having him in my world was to be at a disadvantage in this one.”

“And even if you had a choice, it’d still feel like you lost something,” Robin mumbles above her.

Regina turns her face into his chest, closes her eyes and breathes in deep, thanking whatever forces at play had decided that Robin’s stone was the one to match hers. This would be so, so much harder if he wasn’t. “Robin, I might not be able to give our children what they need. And that is just… not a thing I ever wanted to feel — especially not now. I just…” The rest of the words get lost somewhere between the bottom of her heart and the tears brimming on her lashes, but Robin pulls her closer to him, and she thinks he hears them anyway.

She just wants to be enough, as she is — two halves of a whole.

It’s been far longer than the few minutes the test needed to provide results, but neither of them, it seems, is any rush to get to it just yet. She needs this first, needs a chance to get as much of the awful anxiety and self-doubt out of her system before she can even _begin_ to think about taking that turn — to accepting the thing she’s yet to define. Because she can’t, she _can’t_ go back when she does, and before she takes a step forward, she wants to at least _try_ leaving some of that baggage behind.

But she thinks Robin might need the extra time, too. He’s clearly been holding so _much_ back since he found her in the kitchen earlier and put the pieces of that ridiculous idiom interpretation together, has put her first and prioritized reining in her anxiety above everything else. And she knows — she _knows_ he’s probably over the moon about this, is fit to burst with joy over this unexpected little surprise, and it’s not that she’s _not_ , it’s just… different. She has a foot in each realm, has kept it that way for a long, long time, and being in two places at once means that her own perspective is always going to differ from his. So he’s tucking away his own rose-colored glasses in favor of trying to understand the view through her lenses, and it takes her longer than she’s proud of to realize it’s not just because he’s trying to make her feel better.

When he puts forth his joy, he wants her to match it.

And she wants to get there, to peel back the layers of anxiety and self-doubt, of worries and what-ifs to get to the real heart of the matter here: she _does_ want this, _so_ much, and if magic has to touch this too, she wants to shield it from the parts that are most dark.

She wants better for her children than she ever had on her own.

The quiet helps in slowly getting her there, prevents her from crying outright and gives her the chance to more fully relax her body against Robin’s, breathing coming back down to even. He slackens his hold on her just a touch, enough to be a bit more comfortable, and his thumb starts to trace the lines of her palm idly. He’s thinking — well of course he’s thinking, how could he not, after all she just unloaded on him — but as well as he knows her, she knows him just as well too, knows the tells when his perspective or approach starts to shift. She can hear, feel it in the almost sleep-like rhythm of his breathing, can see it in the way his skin moves over hers. She’s sure that if she looked up at him there’d be a little wrinkle above his nose while his mind works — something far too cute for someone who’s over thirty.

When he does finally break the silence, there’s something just a touch… tentative in his voice, like he’s taking care in constructing the rest of this conversation. “If it helps at all,” he ventures, “you’re not alone in that department. I’ve less experience than you do with magic, and I can’t exactly give our children practical demonstrations or provide quick fixes for any mistakes. I don’t think that… puts me at a disadvantage.”

She almost smiles at that — almost — but there’s something more there, in his voice, an underpinning that doesn’t sit quite right. She narrows her eyes a little, matching that concentrated wrinkle for a second before she finally shifts against his body to look up at him. “But it still bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“Well, yeah,” he admits, looking a little uncomfortable. “But it’s not all _that_ different than the ways it bothers you, Regina. I mean, there’s only so much I’m going to be able to do to help,” he says, distracting himself with moving his hand up to her shoulder, fingers toying with the edge of her robe where it’s started to slip off. “That just… makes me a bit less useful, is all,” he sighs. “I don’t have much of any other option except to point them in the direction of someone else, and that… doesn’t feel all that good, either.”

And hanging in the air between them is the tie that binds: Robin is afraid he won’t be enough, either.

She’s sitting up straight before she can even really think about it, hand still clutching his firmly, and locking her eyes with his is the easiest it’s been all afternoon. “That’s not fair,” she argues, tugging the robe back up over her shoulder. “That’s like comparing apples and… I don’t know, pineapples. You don’t have magic, Robin, no amount of exposure to it is going to make up for that, and it doesn't have any impact in how _good_ you're going to be at this. I mean, it’d be ridiculous to have the expectation of you to be able to help our kids with learning magic and… that is entirely your point, isn’t it?” she sighs, the realization dawning on her. He holds fast — his face remains mostly impassive — but Regina knows what he’s doing, has seen him do it plenty of times before. He’s gotten very good at this over the last seven years, getting her to use her own argument against itself as a means of invalidating all of the ways in which it works against her. “You’re trying to level the playing field by making me point out the fact that I’m holding myself to a double standard,” she deadpans, and it is every bit both accusation and fact.

The way he tugs his bottom lip between his teeth in an obvious attempt to fight back a grin is proof enough to her, but he obliges her in the game, determined to play to the very last. “Well, _half_ of one, anyway,” he says, sounding almost bemused.

And even though she sighs and shakes her head, lets him claim the win, she can’t help but smile at him, too. But it’s not quite… free, unbridled, not yet, and it stays tight around the edges as she looks down at her lap and closes her eyes, heaving a great sigh. “I am being… ridiculous, aren’t I?”

“Hey,” he prompts gently, hooking his fingers under her chin to get her to look up at him again. She does so, reluctantly, smile faltering to a fade, but Robin holds fast, keeps her level and even with him. “Every concern you have is a valid one, Regina, even I can see that, and I’ve got more blind spots when it comes to magic than I probably should by this point.”

“That’s true,” she muses, smirking just a bit, and the tension in the air slackens, not quite so taut.

He huffs out a short laugh, moves in a little closer and shifts his hand to cradle her jaw instead. “Look,” he sighs, “I get wanting to be able to do more, alright? I think I’ve spent at least _half_ of the last six years feeling like that. But sometimes… the _most_ I can do when it comes to magic is be supportive. Lord knows it’s not much by the way of being practical or pragmatic in terms of finding a solution, but I’m… content with that. And I… need you to understand _why_.

“From the _minute_ you brought magic into my life, you have done nothing but indulge every selfish curiosity I’ve had — particularly when it comes to learning about your history. You’ve afford me ample opportunities to explore your world and experience every little part of it: the good, and the bad, and every cauldron-filled, lint-thieving, and idiom-infested piece in between,” he chuckles, running his thumb along the apple of her cheek and oh, _oh_ , there the tears are again, pushing past stinging to falling as she blinks rapidly to try and clear her vision. Robin responds in kind, releases the hand he’s holding in favor of cupping her face with both hands, and every breath that leaves Regina’s lungs is drawn from years back — from eighteen and twenty-two and the gasps she’d taken to survive the time between.

It only makes Robin all the more earnest, has him shifting that much closer, eyes studying her face like there’s a god damn galaxy to be explored — _god_ , her husband is ridiculous, and wonderful, and she would wonder what in any realm she did to deserve him if he weren’t already going to the trouble of telling her himself. “I have never been afraid of magic,” he promises, low and steady, “because I trust _you_ , Regina, even when you’re not quite sure of yourself. I trust that you’ll always have our best interests at heart, that you will go to… _great_ lengths to ensure our safety. I know that you will put that brilliant mind of yours to work if there’s ever a problem you can’t quite solve right away. And I know,” he adds, warm and very matter-of-fact as he tilts her head up just a fraction and leans in until he’s just far enough away for them to keep one another in focus, “that you will be _exactly_ the same with our kids, Regina — however many we end up having — because you could never be otherwise.

“You are... tenacious, and devoted, and more resilient than anyone should ever have to be, and _that_ ,” he emphasizes, ducking in to bump his nose against hers, “is more than I could ever ask for in a partner when starting a family.”

And there’s nothing left for her to _do_ , after that, other than rest her forehead clumsily against his and smile, warm and broken and honestly more than a little wet at this point. “I knew I married you for a reason,” she says, and his mouth is on hers before she can even so much as laugh. The first kiss is elemental — air and earth, fire and water — and it is every _bit_ magic, more than spells or potions or the flash of lightning and clap of thunder that literally takes her to another realm. The second is the calm, just after a storm, and the third pulls forth her light, has her grinning into each subsequent kiss like a complete _idiot_ , and she resolutely _does not care_.

From the day she first opened the door to find him waiting on the other side, Robin Locksley has done _nothing_ but make her life charmed.

There’s something altogether different in his smile when they finally pull apart, gentle and warm and easy, far less hesitant than before, and they’re close, she thinks, to being able to be free in their regard. “I think we’ve waited long enough,” he offers.

“Probably,” she agrees with a small sigh, reaching up to encircle his wrists for half a moment to ensure she’s anchored.

A beat, and then, “Do you want me to —”

“No,” she dismisses, shaking her head a little before gently pulling his hands away. “No, I want to do it. That was the whole point of this, wasn’t it? To make it mine?” Robin _hmm_ s and nods but doesn’t offer up any other reply or platitude or protest, and he’s close to matching her, she thinks, in the sheer idiocy of his smile. She shakes her head, bemused, squeezes his hands briefly before shifting to make her way off the bead. She stops, though, before her feet touch the floor, one hand still clasping his, and she looks back at him for a long moment, searching. “You sure you’re ready for this?” she ventures. “It’s not going to be easy. My magic might go haywire and the entire house might be in disarray for a while.”

“I think I can handle it,” he throws back easily. “I did survive a lint gremlin for two weeks last year, after all.”

Regina rolls her eyes and pats his hand before rising from the bed, just barely suppressing a snort. “Somehow I don’t think that speaks to your ability to handle this,” she quips, moving around the bed to her nightstand.

She adjusts her robe a bit on the way there, tightens the tie and slows to a stop just in front of the nightstand. She hears the bed creak a little behind her — Robin’s probably gotten to his feet as well — but she doesn’t turn around, just eyes the innocuous little stick where she’d left it much like she’d done in the bathroom earlier, ready to tear the wall down.

And then there are two little pink lines, and the whole world shifts without shaking the ground.

She turns, finds Robin hovering, waiting at the foot of the bed, and her smile turns a little wry as she offers up the stick for display. “Well,” she sighs, “there’s definitely a bun in the oven.”

A warm laugh bursts out of him, wonderful and wanted, and he is _unabashed_ in the way he smiles as he closes the distances between them. “I thought you’d had your fill of baking related idioms today,” he teases.

“Yes, well,” she grumbles, half-falling against him as he hooks an arm around her waist and takes the test from her, “on the off chance that saying it out loud will make that mess in the kitchen clean itself up, I figured it couldn’t hurt.”

“Accepting the idiom’s truth,” he recalls, dropping the test into her robe pocket and settling his hands at her waist. “Think that’ll be enough, then, or do you think we have to be more explicit about it, because —”

“Oh my god, just say it,” she laughs, playfully hitting his chest. “You clearly want to, and we both know we’re done dancing around this, anyway.”

And with the reassurance that his joy will be matched, Robin settles his hands against the small of her back and pulls her flush against him, practically _beaming_ from ear to ear when he finally, _finally_ can say, “We’re having a baby.”

“Well _I_ am,” she quips, trailing her fingers up his chest to hook her hands around to the back of his neck. “I don’t know about _you_ —”

“Oh hush,” Robin mumbles, leaning in to dart a quick kiss to the corner of her mouth. “Don’t be a spoilsport.”

Regina tugs her bottom lip between her teeth, grinning as he trails another soft kiss or two along her cheek before nuzzling against her temple. And for the first time since the oven had sort of exploded on her earlier this afternoon, she finally feels settled, content, lighter. Oh, she’s definitely still nervous, anxious about the _what if_ s and how little control she’s going to have over so many of them, but it’s not quite so overwhelming as it was before. She’d been so narrow-focused on all of the ways in which she _could_ fail that she couldn’t really see much of anything else — literally, in the case of the kitchen earlier. She’d _needed_ this, the opportunity to push the dark up and out in order to grant herself a little more clarity, and Robin, well.

Robin had given her perspective.

There’s a barrier of light between her and and the garden of shadows she’s forced to tend, now, a buffer and balm allowing her to stand tall, on the other side of that wall, and take stock of where she is and where she’s about to go.

Who she’s about to become.

Still, it’s all a bit… disorienting, hasn’t quite sunk in all the way yet, so it’s with a deep breath that she pulls away a little to look at him properly, trying to find some sort of practical thought to pull on — what the next step might be. “I guess now I can… get in touch with Ashley? See if she can give me a reference for a good doctor and wow, okay, this is really happening, isn’t it?” she realizes, huffing out a small laugh. “I’m... pregnant.”

Robin just continues to _smile_ at her, eyes bright and blue and full of far, far too much love as he smoothes his hands along her sides, busses a kiss to her temple. “According to both mortal and magical instruments, yes, it appears that way.”

“Oh god,” she groans, resting her forehead against his chin. “Don’t remind me. I am not looking forward to cleaning that up.”

“Leave it to me,” he murmurs, and he barely gives her the chance to pull back and draw breath to ready a protest before he’s shaking his head and running his thumb along her bottom lip. “I thought about offering, earlier, but I wasn’t sure if it would just increase your ire. But it’s _fine_ , Regina — we’re fine, and I don’t mind at least getting the whole thing started.” She purses her lips against his thumb, deliberately pouting a little, but Robin just rolls his eyes. “Tell you what — why don’t _you_ get in touch with Ashley and get dressed? I’ll go downstairs, order takeout from the chinese place downtown you like, and while we wait, I — _we_ can come up with a plan of attack for the kitchen, yeah? And then,” he says, reaching up to trace his fingertips along her brow, “we can pile our plates high, curl up on the couch and maybe pull out the _Bewitched_ boxset. Does that sound agreeable?”

Regina arches an eyebrow, lips twisting into a smile. “At what point during all of this did you come up with _that_ plan to make me feel better?”

His smile turns a little sheepish, but all he does is shrug and say, “Honestly? Before I even walked in the kitchen. It smelled like you’d been baking.”

“Well, _technically_ that’s not… entirely untrue,” she allows, teasing a bit.

He chuckles, dry and in the back of his throat, and leans in to steal a kiss, murmurs a low _cheeky_ against her lips. “You know,” he muses as he pulls back, eyes sparking, “the original plan also involved drawing you a bath and opening a bottle of red, but seeing as how you’ve already bathed and, well, you are currently _baking_ ,” he drawls, just barely biting back a laugh, “I had to alter the plan a bit.”

“Ah,” she replies knowingly, “well do you mind if I make an alteration of my own?”

“Name it and it’s yours,” he says, and he is _teasing_ her for avoiding definitions earlier.

“Now who’s being _cheeky_?” she mutters, leveling a look at him. “I’m not opposed to a night in with the Stephens, but do you mind if we pop in _The Worst Witch_ first?”

“Not at all,” he agrees amiably, “so long as I can ask why.”

Regina bites her lip, nose wrinkling a little at being called out. “Honestly? Spending seventy minutes watching a group of hags be utterly incompetent teachers to a bunch of budding young witches is a _little_ bit of a confidence booster right now. And that’s… petty, and self-indulgent, but right now I’m kind of okay with that. A little extra Tim Curry doesn’t hurt, either.”

“How _dare_ you use the H-word in this house,” Robin gasps, still absolutely teasing her, but he matches her answering laugh with his own, busses a kiss, two, three against her lips. The last is softer, slow, and she arches up on the balls of her feet, presses herself flush against him and cards her fingers through his hair. His hands tighten at her waist, flex and release and settle down low at her hips just before he pulls away, exhaling slowly as he touches his forehead to hers. “As you wish.”

When he finally leaves the room they’re both still smiling, and Regina’s heart is fit to burst.

She takes her time in pulling herself together, dumps the test and disrobes before shuffling through her dresser for something comfortable to lounge in the rest of the night. She settles on suitable pajamas — a cream-colored off-the-shoulder top, a pair of pajama pants patterned with pointed hats and broomsticks (yes, she is an adult approaching thirty; _no_ , she does not give a damn) — before sending off a quick message to Ashley asking for the number for her obstetrician’s office, or a good alternative. Her heart stutters once she hits _send_ , and each new beat pushes her forward to new reality.

She is going to be a _mother_.

She carries that with her — literally, in a sense — as she makes her way down the back staircase in search of Luna. It’s better to let the, well, metaphorical cat out of the bag, so to speak, now rather than wait a little while to be safe. Luna may be able to help, if things go awry, and she deserves to know how much _her_ world is about to change, too. More than that, though, she is _family_ , and Regina will not spend the next month or so exchanging whispers with Robin for the sake of keeping the secret. She cannot bear the thought of Luna taking it the wrong way — of mistaking their secrecy for exclusion rather than caution.

They look after one another, their odd little family, and together, they’ll take care of one — or two — more.

Luna is nowhere to be found when Regina reaches the lower landing, but the sight that greets her as she turns to make her way toward the kitchen has her stopping in her tracks.

The kitchen is _spotless_ , and Regina knows full well that none of it had been Robin’s doing.

Slowly, her lips curve into a smile, and maybe, she thinks, this particular idiom interpretation — sans the annoying little failsafe mechanism, of course — isn’t _quite_ so bad, after all.


End file.
